Observations of the moon have revealed the final resting place of the European Space Agency's first lunar mission, SMART-1. The spacecraft was sent into a controlled impact with the lunar surface 11 years ago. Although an impact flash was imaged at the time by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on the dark side of the boundary between night and day on the lunar surface, the exact location had not been identified until now. Results have been presented today at the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) 2017 in Riga. Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:SMART-1

ADELAIDE, Australia — The partner space agencies of the International Space Station said Sept. 25 they have had discussions about the future of the station beyond 2024, but indicated no urgency in making a decision.

At a press conference during the 68th International Astronautical Congress here, NASA Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot said he has talked with the other partners about both an extension of the ISS as well as cooperation on the agency’s proposed Deep Space Gateway, although no decisions on either were imminent.

“We’ve got a list of criteria that we’re putting together to say what would we do post-2024,” he said, referring to past studies that conclued it’s technically feasible to operate the ISS beyond that date. “This is something that we’ve talked about pretty consistently, whether it’s at our level of the heads of agencies or the level just below.”

Lightfoot added that discussions among the heads of agencies are planned for this week at the conference, but didn’t indicate a timeline for making a decision beyond noting that the European Space Agency didn’t formally commit to the extension of the ISS to 2024 until a ministerial meeting last December.

Igor Komarov, head of the Russian state space corporation Roscosmos, suggested that there would be the need for a research facility in low Earth orbit beyond 2024. “We need something in low Earth orbit,” he said. “It’s better to make research in LEO if its possible to make them there.”

Future research, though, could be done with a different approach that the current management of the ISS. “In the future, should it be a different structure, maybe less investment-consuming, more efficient?” he said. “The next generation shouldn’t be a copy of the existing one.”

Komarov, however, backed away from reports that Russia was considering separating its modules from the ISS to form a Russian space station after 2024, acknowledging that the technical feasibility of that has been studied. “We have no plans to separate the Russian segment from the ISS,” he said. “We keep the same position, that we should work on the ISS together with our partners.”

Naoki Okumura, president of the Japanese space agency JAXA, said consideration of the long-term future of the ISS was premature at this time. “We need to look at the reality today before we think about the future that’s too far away,” he said through an interpreter. “By 2024, we need to make sure to generate as many results as possible from ISS-related missions.”

However, he said JAXA was in discussions with NASA about a potential role on the Deep Space Gateway facility in cislunar space. “JAXA is now making a serious deliberation as to what JAXA can do if we join the Deep Space Gateway and how we can support that,” he said. “We are in the middle of those discussions.”

Lightfoot cautioned that the Deep Space Gateway remained just a concept at this time, without the former endorsement of the project by the administration or Congress. “We shared that with our international partners,” he said, starting with discussions in April at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.

At a panel discussion later in the day at the conference, executives with Boeing and RSC Energia endorsed continued work on the ISS as well as development of the Deep Space Gateway concept.

“I think that it’s really important that, when you look at the transition of the International Space Station, we look at some lessons learned from shuttle and don’t repeat those,” said John Elbon, vice president and general manager of space exploration at Boeing. That means, he said, “we don’t set an arbitrary date to retire the station before there’s another low Earth orbit destination that can fill the requirements of the space station.”

WASHINGTON — International cooperation in dealing with the growing problem or orbital debris is essential, a panel of experts argued, but said not to expect a comprehensive accord on the issue for the foreseeable future.

At a discussion about international approaches to orbital debris, organized by the Aerospace Corporation here Sept. 21, panelists from the United States and several other nations emphasized bilateral and multilateral approaches over comprehensive international accords, like a proposed International Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities.

That proposed code, introduced by the European Union in 2008, included a number of provisions intended to reduce the chance of collisions and minimizing the creation of debris, either though accidental or deliberate actions. While the code had the support of some major space nations, including the United States, opposition from others has effectively blocked its progress.

Michiru Nishida of the Japanese Embassy’s political section noted on the panel that Japan has supported development of the code. “Unfortunately, due to various factors, including strong opposition from certain countries, the progress of this rulemaking for the code of conduct is currently suspended,” he said.

Later in the panel, he said he was skeptical that there would be near-term progress in reviving the code. “I don’t see much prospect for that,” he said.

Frank Rose, a former assistant secretary of state and deputy assistant secretary for space and defense policy during the Obama Administration who is now chief of government relations for the Aerospace Corporation, said the future of U.S. support for the proposed code has “yet to be determined” by the Trump administration.

“I don’t believe the new administration here in Washington has outlined its view,” he said. “At some point in the near future I’m sure it will once they conduct their space review.”

Nishida and Rose instead supported an ongoing effort by the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space to develop guidelines for what it calls the long-term sustainability of space. That effort includes space debris and other issues. The committee approved an initial set of guidelines last year and plans to submit a complete set to the UN General Assembly in the fall of 2018.

“I think we’ve actually made very good progress with the technical experts at the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space,” Rose said. “We still have more work to do, but I think we’re making progress.”

Panelists also emphasized progress made in agreements between countries on space situational awareness. Nishida noted that Japan has expanded its cooperation with the United States, providing space situational awareness information to the U.S. in addition to receiving it.

“Over the last decade, U.S.-Japan space cooperation has, I like to say, expanded beyond our wildest belief,” Rose said. That growth, he said, was enabled by a change in Japanese law in 2008 that ended a prohibition on national security space activities. “As a result, we can cooperate with Japan on the full spectrum of issues: civil space, but also national security space. That is a big deal.”

Jan Drobik, minister-counsellor for defense, science and technology at the Australian Embassy, said his country, despite lacking a space agency or strong space industry, has found ways to cooperate on space situational awareness with the U.S. and others by leverage its capabilities, such as the ability to host tracking assets.

“We’re pushing this partnership model. We can’t do it alone,” he said. “We occupy a unique piece of geography in the Southern Hemisphere: a safe, stable political environment. That enables us to have a range of terrestrial-based space tracking facilities.”

Neville Clayton, who serves on the defense staff at the British Embassy, said he was encouraged by comments by U.S. Air Force officials at the recent Air, Space and Cyber Conference that talked about the importance of international cooperation. However, he said those broad comments don’t always translate at the operational level.

“I’m absolutely convinced that we have senior leadership buy-in into this, but sometimes we’re a bit stymied at the tactical level, when people are just prone to overclassify things, and that makes the access and that partnership more difficult,” he said.

Such partnerships among countries, panelists said, can address orbital debris mitigation and space security issues to at least a degree in the absence of a broader international accord. Rose said that, despite broader geopolitical issues in the U.S.-China relationship, the countries have recognized it is in the benefit of both countries to mitigate the growth of orbital debris.

“In the near term, I don’t think the prospects of a code of conduct are particularly positive, but I think there’s a lot of work we can do,” he said.

SYDNEY — NASA plans to publish a revised launch date for the first mission of its Space Launch System in October amid reports that the flight has been pushed back to nearly the end of 2019.

In a statement to SpaceNews Sept. 22, NASA spokesperson Kathryn Hambleton said that NASA will issue an update for the scheduled launch of Exploration Mission (EM) 1 in October.

That schedule, she said, is being influenced by several issues, ranging from work on the European-provided service module for the Orion spacecraft and the impact of several weather events, including both the tornado that struck the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans and Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which shut down the Johnson Space Center in Houston and Kennedy Space Center in Florida respectively by more than a week.

“All of these factors are influencing launch planning and will result in an EM-1 mission in 2019,” she said. “An update to the agency’s target for EM-1 launch is expected in October.”

NASA had already indicated that EM-1, originally scheduled for launch as soon as 2017, would be delayed until some time in 2019. In an April response to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report, Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said that the agency was in the process of establishing a new launch date for EM-1 in 2019 after the report cited issues that threatened to delay the then-scheduled date of November 2018.

NASA confirmed those plans in May when the agency announced that it would not put a crew on EM-1 after performing a study at the request of the White House regarding that. The agency concluded that while it would be feasible to do so, there were cost, schedule and risk issues in doing so.

At that time Gerstenmaier acknowledged schedule issues, including a recent welding mishap at Michoud that damaged a liquid hydrogen tank being built for SLS qualification tests, would push EM-1 to 2019. “We’re probably a month or two away from coming up with a final schedule,” he said at the time, although the agency has not provided a schedule update since the May announcement.

At that time, Gerstenmaier also said that the EM-1 delay would also likely push back EM-2, which was then scheduled for August 2021. Part of any delay is the need to reconfigure ground systems at the Kennedy Space Center after the EM-1 launch to support the use of an upgraded version of the SLS with the more powerful Exploration Upper Stage.

Cannes, September 25, 2017 - Thales Alenia Space has recently been awarded one of three competitive studies funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) to lead the design definition of the Payload Module (PLM) for SMILE (Solar Wind Magnetospheric Ionospheric Link Explorer). SMILE is a joint science mission between ESA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which aims to investigate the interaction between Earth’s protective shield – the magnetosphere – and the supersonic solar wind.

The SMILE satellite consists of a platform, provided by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a fully independent Payload Module, provided by ESA. The PLM hosts the four customer furnished science instruments* from Canada, the UK and China, the PLM Control and Mass Memory Unit, the PLM Power Distribution Unit and the X-band communication system used to downlink all science data. During the study phase, Thales Alenia Space in the UK will work with the ESA team to define and optimise the Payload Module, including the structural and thermal solution, definition of the supporting PLM equipment, accommodation of the four science instruments and the delivery of all science data to the ground. With a planned launch in 2021 from French Guiana the two tonne satellite will enter a Highly Elliptic Orbit (HEO) with an apogee of around 120,000 Km over the Earth’s North Pole.

Following a competitive evaluation prior to PDR (Preliminary Design Review), one of the competing designs will be down-selected for the SMILE mission. If successful, Thales Alenia Space in the UK will procure the equipment, assemble, integrate and test the Payload Module in the UK’s future National Satellite Testing Facility. This world class facility, due to open in 2020, has been awarded funding by the UK Government’s flagship Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund to boost the UK’s space capabilities for the design and build of more complex space instruments and technologically advanced satellites.

“Thales Alenia Space in the UK is proud to team with ESA experts and to contribute to the SMILE mission, which expects to make an important contribution to our understanding of space weather and, in particular, the physical processes taking place during the continuous interaction between the solar wind and the magnetosphere“, said Ben Olivier CEO of Thales Alenia Space in the UK.

This contract reflects Thales Alenia Space’s strategy of growing its European footprint and is fully in line with market trends and growth dynamics. For Thales Alenia Space, this is a significant milestone in the recognition of the company’s capability as a Prime contractor in the UK for major space missions. The SMILE design definition phase is Thales Alenia Space first opportunity to work directly, as a Prime in the UK, with the engineering teams of the ESA Science Directorate. It also demonstrates the confidence and trust placed in Thales Alenia Space in the UK and its teams of highly skilled engineers.

Thales Alenia Space in the UK was established in 2014 with offices in Bristol, Harwell and Belfast and is a leader in propulsion systems, mission subsystems, and next generation payloads for telecoms, military satellites and UK satellite constellations. Thales Alenia Space in the UK is also responsible for the Broadband Radiometer – a space borne instrument, as part of the European Space Agency ‘Earthcare’ programme, which will help scientists understand and monitor global warming.

Media contact:
Jill Hutchinson
+44 (0) 7854 959 805

About Thales Alenia Space

Combining 40 years of experience and a unique diversity of expertise, talents and cultures, Thales Alenia Space architects design and deliver high technology solutions for telecommunications, navigation, Earth observation, environmental management, exploration, science and orbital infrastructures. Governments, institutions and companies rely on Thales Alenia Space to design, operate and deliver satellite-based systems that help them position and connect anyone or anything, everywhere, help observe our planet, help optimize the use of our planet's – and our solar system’s – resources. Thales Alenia Space believes in space as humankind’s new horizon, which will enable to build a better, more sustainable life on Earth. A joint venture between Thales (67%) and Leonardo (33%), Thales Alenia Space also teams up with Telespazio to form the parent companies’ Space Alliance, which offers a complete range of services and solutions. Thales Alenia Space posted consolidated revenues of about 2.4 billion euros in 2016 and has 7,980 employees in nine countries. www.thalesaleniaspace.com

Sydney, Australia (XNA) Sep 22, 2017
The first transaction in space mining could only be 10 years away, the director of the Australian Center for Space Engineering Research, Andrew Dempster, told Xinhua on Wednesday, at the third Off Earth Mining Forum in Sydney.
With some of the sharpest minds on hand to represent the world's leading institutions including NASA, the European Space Agency and the Hague Space Resources Governi Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство

The Seraphim Space Fund will also support other technologies that generate “data from above” such as drones, said Mark Boggett, Seraphim Capital’s chief executive officer.

“The fund is backed by a range of corporate and institutional parties which the fund can leverage,” said Boggett. “Giant organisations like Airbus and SES have invested in the fund. We look to use their knowledge to support our due diligence efforts, to create customer and partner opportunities for invested companies and potentially to create merger and acquisition opportunities of for the portfolio.”

The British Business Bank, the European Space Agency, as well as the UK’s Satellite Application Catapult, are also supporting the fund

“This is a unique approach in venture bringing together various players within the ecosystem with a vested interest to identify, invest and support emerging, innovative technologies and new business models,” Boggett said.

Google Earth founder Michael Jones has joined the fund as a managing partner.

“By virtue of being a specialist space-tech investor – the only dedicated space focused VC globally, we are benefitting from very strong, global deal flow,” Jones said in a statement. “This provides us with a panoptic view of all elements of the new space ecosystem, resulting in us having unrivalled insight into the cutting edge sector developments and global network of space-tech contacts.”

Boggett said the fund aims to support development of applications that would expand the uptake of EO data in sectors such as insurance, agriculture, transport and environment monitoring.

The London-based fund will also invest in development of innovative satellite and drone technologies including sensors and antennas, but also downlink technologies, storage, and analysis and security applications.

“Together with Seraphim we will stimulate the European economy through the space industry,” said Nick Appleyard, head of ESA Business Applications. “We will support innovators developing ventures that leverage space and provide them with the right resources and network.”

In January, Seraphim Capital invested into San Francisco-headquartered start-up Spire, which is operating a constellation of Earth-observing nano-satellites. In August, the fund backed Finland’s IceEye, which is developing the world’s first microsatellite synthetic aperture radar.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA’s Cassini spacecraft disintegrated in the skies above Saturn early Friday in a final, fateful blaze of cosmic glory, following a remarkable journey of 20 years.

Confirmation of Cassini’s expected demise came about 7:55 a.m. EDT. That’s when radio signals from the spacecraft – its last scientific gifts to Earth – came to an abrupt halt. The radio waves went flat, and the spacecraft fell silent.

Cassini actually burned up like a meteor 83 minutes earlier as it dove through Saturn’s atmosphere, becoming one with the giant gas planet it set out in 1997 to explore. But it took that long for the news to reach Earth a billion miles away.

The only spacecraft to ever orbit Saturn, Cassini showed us the planet, its rings and moons up close in all their splendor. Perhaps most tantalizing, ocean worlds were unveiled on the moons Enceladus and Titan, which could possibly harbor life.

Dutiful to the end, the Cassini snapped its “last memento photos” Thursday and sampled Saturn’s atmosphere Friday morning as it made its final plunge.

Program manager Earl Maize made the official pronouncement:

“This has been an incredible mission, an incredible spacecraft and you’re all an incredible team,” Maize said. “I’m going to call this the end of mission.”

More than 1,500 people, many of them past and present team members, had gathered at California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for what was described as both a vigil and celebration. Even more congregated at nearby California Institute of Technology, which runs the lab for NASA.

NASA’s science mission director, Thomas Zurbuchen, made note of all the tissues inside JPL’s Mission Control, along with the customary lucky peanuts. Team members were clearly emotional, he said.

“These worlds that they found, we never knew were there, are changing how we think about life itself,” he said. “And so for me, that’s why it’s truly a civilization-scale mission, one that will stand out among other missions, anywhere.”

Project scientist Linda Spilker noted Cassini has been running “a marathon of scientific discovery” for 13 years at Saturn.

“So we’re here today to cheer as Cassini finishes that race,” she said.

The spacecraft tumbled out of control while plummeting at more than 76,000 mph (122,000 kph). Project officials invited ground telescopes to look for Cassini’s last-gasp flash, but weren’t hopeful it would be spotted against the vast backdrop of the solar system’s second biggest planet.

This Grand Finale, as NASA called it, came about as Cassini’s fuel tank started getting low after 13 years exploring the planet. Scientists wanted to prevent Cassini from crashing into Enceladus or Titan – and contaminating those pristine worlds. And so in April, Cassini was directed into the previously unexplored gap between Saturn’s cloud tops and the rings. Twenty-two times, Cassini entered the gap and came out again. The last time was last week.

The leader of Cassini’s imaging team, Carolyn Porco, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, was so involved with the mission for so long that now, “I consider it the start of life, part two.”

Cassini departed Earth in 1997 and arrived at the sixth planet from our sun in 2004. The hitchhiking European Huygens landed on big moon Titan in 2005. Nothing from Earth has landed farther. Three other spacecraft previously flew past Saturn, but Cassini was the only one to actually circle the planet.

In all, Cassini collected more than 453,000 images and traveled 4.9 billion miles. It was an international endeavor, with 27 nations taking part. The final price tag was $3.9 billion.

European space officials joined their U.S. colleagues to bid Cassini farewell.

“It’s a very historical moment,” said the Italian Space Agency’s president, Roberto Battiston.

There were lighthearted touches as well. During its broadcast NASA played a video clip of the Cassini Virtual Singers, spacecraft team members who belted out, “Tonight, tonight, we take the plunge tonight …” to the music from “West Side Story.”

Scientists are already eager to go back and delve into the wet, wild worlds of Enceladus and Titan. Proposals are under consideration by NASA, but there’s nothing official yet. In the meantime, NASA plans sometime in the 2020s to send an orbiter and lander to Europa, a moon of Jupiter believed to have a global ocean that might be compatible for life.

“Yes, we really want to go back” to Saturn, Zurbuchen said. “It’s such a wonderful system, we don’t want to leave it alone.”

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA’s Cassini spacecraft disintegrated in the skies above Saturn early Friday in a final, fateful blaze of cosmic glory, following a remarkable journey of 20 years.

Confirmation of Cassini’s expected demise came about 7:55 a.m. EDT. That’s when radio signals from the spacecraft – its last scientific gifts to Earth – came to an abrupt halt. The radio waves went flat, and the spacecraft fell silent.

Cassini actually burned up like a meteor 83 minutes earlier as it dove through Saturn’s atmosphere, becoming one with the giant gas planet it set out in 1997 to explore. But it took that long for the news to reach Earth a billion miles away.

The only spacecraft to ever orbit Saturn, Cassini showed us the planet, its rings and moons up close in all their splendor. Perhaps most tantalizing, ocean worlds were unveiled on the moons Enceladus and Titan, which could possibly harbor life.

Dutiful to the end, the Cassini snapped its “last memento photos” Thursday and sampled Saturn’s atmosphere Friday morning as it made its final plunge.

Program manager Earl Maize made the official pronouncement:

“This has been an incredible mission, an incredible spacecraft and you’re all an incredible team,” Maize said. “I’m going to call this the end of mission.”

More than 1,500 people, many of them past and present team members, had gathered at California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for what was described as both a vigil and celebration. Even more congregated at nearby California Institute of Technology, which runs the lab for NASA.

NASA’s science mission director, Thomas Zurbuchen, made note of all the tissues inside JPL’s Mission Control, along with the customary lucky peanuts. Team members were clearly emotional, he said.

“These worlds that they found, we never knew were there, are changing how we think about life itself,” he said. “And so for me, that’s why it’s truly a civilization-scale mission, one that will stand out among other missions, anywhere.”

Project scientist Linda Spilker noted Cassini has been running “a marathon of scientific discovery” for 13 years at Saturn.

“So we’re here today to cheer as Cassini finishes that race,” she said.

The spacecraft tumbled out of control while plummeting at more than 76,000 mph (122,000 kph). Project officials invited ground telescopes to look for Cassini’s last-gasp flash, but weren’t hopeful it would be spotted against the vast backdrop of the solar system’s second biggest planet.

This Grand Finale, as NASA called it, came about as Cassini’s fuel tank started getting low after 13 years exploring the planet. Scientists wanted to prevent Cassini from crashing into Enceladus or Titan – and contaminating those pristine worlds. And so in April, Cassini was directed into the previously unexplored gap between Saturn’s cloud tops and the rings. Twenty-two times, Cassini entered the gap and came out again. The last time was last week.

The leader of Cassini’s imaging team, Carolyn Porco, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, was so involved with the mission for so long that now, “I consider it the start of life, part two.”

Cassini departed Earth in 1997 and arrived at the sixth planet from our sun in 2004. The hitchhiking European Huygens landed on big moon Titan in 2005. Nothing from Earth has landed farther. Three other spacecraft previously flew past Saturn, but Cassini was the only one to actually circle the planet.

In all, Cassini collected more than 453,000 images and traveled 4.9 billion miles. It was an international endeavor, with 27 nations taking part. The final price tag was $3.9 billion.

European space officials joined their U.S. colleagues to bid Cassini farewell.

“It’s a very historical moment,” said the Italian Space Agency’s president, Roberto Battiston.

There were lighthearted touches as well. During its broadcast NASA played a video clip of the Cassini Virtual Singers, spacecraft team members who belted out, “Tonight, tonight, we take the plunge tonight …” to the music from “West Side Story.”

Scientists are already eager to go back and delve into the wet, wild worlds of Enceladus and Titan. Proposals are under consideration by NASA, but there’s nothing official yet. In the meantime, NASA plans sometime in the 2020s to send an orbiter and lander to Europa, a moon of Jupiter believed to have a global ocean that might be compatible for life.

“Yes, we really want to go back” to Saturn, Zurbuchen said. “It’s such a wonderful system, we don’t want to leave it alone.”

Kourou, French Guiana (SPX) Sep 15, 2017
Arianespace will launch four new satellites for the Galileo constellation, using two Ariane 62 versions of the next-generation Ariane 6 rocket from the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana.
The contract will be conducted by the European Space Agency (ESA) on behalf of the European Commission (DG Growth) and the European Union.
Stephane Israel, Arianespace Chief Executive Officer, and Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство, Серия РН Ариан, Arianespace

16

Montreal Protocol signed 30 years ago has grown into a success story in international environmental protection

Montreal Protocol signed 30 years ago has grown into a success story in international environmental protection

15.9.2017 9:30

16 September marks the 30th anniversary of the Montreal Protocol. Thanks to the protocol, the ozone layer is now recovering and it is expected to be almost fully restored in about 50 to 70 years. All countries of the world have ratified the protocol.

"The Montreal Protocol is a success story in international environmental protection. The protocol has contributed to a reduction in the global use of substances that deplete the ozone by more than 98%. This means that millions of people have avoided skin cancer and eye diseases and grain yields have been secured", says Minister for Housing, Energy and the Environment Kimmo Tiilikainen.

Ozone layer protects life on Earth from excessive UV radiation that causes skin cancer and other health problems in humans and damages plants and plankton. The hole in the ozone layer discovered in the atmosphere above the Antarctic in 1985 gave rise to major concerns about the depletion of the ozone layer and the threat this causes to Earth.

It soon became evident that the hole in the ozone layer had been caused by the commonly used CFC gases – mainly freons used for cooling and refrigeration – and halons used in fire protection systems. By the protocol signed on 16 September 1987 the countries agreed on putting an end to the production and use of these substances.

Ozone layer is slow to recover and needs to be monitored closely

The Montreal Protocol has been very well respected. According to follow-up studies, the emissions of chlorine compounds started to fall soon after the protocol was signed. However, the recovery of the ozone layer is a very slow process as the substances that deplete it persist in the atmosphere for a long time.

The Finnish Meteorological Institute has participated in several satellite projects where the development of the ozone layer has been followed. The Finnish-Dutch ozone monitoring instrument OMI in the NASA satellite has been measuring the ozone layer on the global scale since 2004. These measurements have continued the studies started already in 1979.

"The situation looks quite good at the moment, but the state of the ozone layer needs to be monitored very closely. Because of climate change the ozone layer of the future differs from that in the 1980s, which may have some impact on its recovery. This is why we cannot just assume that the situation stays good, but further studies are still needed", says Erkki Kyrölä, Research Professor at the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

The TROPOMI instrument to be launched from Russia next month continues the ozone time series measurements made by OMI. TROPOMI, built in cooperation between the Netherlands and the European Space Agency ESA, will be carried by the Sentinel 5 Precursor satellite, and it is part of the Copernicus remote sensing system of the European Commission.

Montreal Protocol contributes to the efforts to mitigate climate change

In autumn 2016 the nations of the world agreed in Kigali, Rwanda that the HFC gases used to substitute for substances that destroy the ozone layer will also be covered by strict regulation under the Montreal Protocol.

HFC compounds are strong greenhouse gases whose use is growing rapidly especially in the developing world as the increasingly wealthy middle class is buying refrigeration and air conditioning appliances. HFC gases were used as substitutes for substances that destroyed the ozone layer, but they were intended as a temporary solution only. Now their production and consumption is also being regulated on the global scale.

"It is estimated that by actions specified in the Montreal Protocol we can prevent carbon dioxide emissions corresponding to 70 gigatons by 2050. Reducing the use of HFC compounds is one of the most significant individual measures in stopping the global temperature rise", says Eeva Nurmi, Ministerial Adviser at the Ministry of the Environment.

"We may even double the already highly significant climate benefits to be derived from the Kigali Agreement by improving the energy efficiency of cooling and refrigeration appliances and using more energy-efficient substances such as natural refrigerants in these," says Tapio Reinikainen, Senior Officer at the Finnish Environment Institute.

Tukes keeps a register on qualified refrigerator equipment companies

The placing on the market of refrigerants that harm the ozone layer was prohibited in Finland years ago, and the substances used earlier have been replaced by F-gas refrigerants. The refrigerator equipment companies included in the register of the Finnish Safety and Chemicals Agency Tukes install and maintain equipment containing F-gas-based refrigerants.

The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, is set to end on Sept. 15. The mission has told us a great deal about the unique and unexpected chemistry of Saturn's moon Titan, and it has changed the way we think about our own planet and the entire solar system. Learn how in this video from Speaking of Chemistry: https://youtu.be/Dee0V7axuPI Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Космическое агентство США, Planet Labs

PARIS — The European Space Agency stepped up to be Arianespace’s first customer for the next-generation Ariane 6 rocket, while keeping Soyuz as a backup option.

Signing the contract on behalf of the European Commission and the European Union, ESA agreed to launch four Galileo navigation satellites two at a time on Ariane 6 rockets. The missions will both use the Ariane 62, the lighter version equipped with two side-boosters, and will launch from Europe’s Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana in late-2020 and mid-2021.

ArianeGroup, formerly Airbus Safran Launchers, is building the Ariane 6, with ESA overseeing the rocket’s procurement and architecture. Arianespace has a first-ever demonstration flight of the Ariane 6 on July 16, 2020.

“Arianespace is especially proud to have won this first launch contract for the Ariane 6 from its loyal customers and partners, the European Commission (DG Growth) and ESA,” Stéphane Israël, Arianespace CEO, said in a Sept. 14 statement.

ESA’s contract includes the ability to rely on Soyuz, also launching from the Guiana Space Centre, if the Ariane 6 is not able to complete the mission. Arianespace launched 14 of the 18 Galileo satellites currently in orbit using Soyuz rockets; an Ariane 5 launched the most recent four.

The Ariane 6 and Vega C rockets are intended to replace Arianespace’s existing launch family of the Ariane 5, Soyuz and Vega, assuring European access to space with vehicles that can compete more effectively with SpaceX and other rising launch competitors.

Arianespace has another four-satellite Galileo launch using the Ariane 5 “Evolution Storable” version in December, followed by another in summer 2018.

Galileo satellites weigh roughly 750-kilograms each and operate in a 23,000-kilometer medium-Earth orbit. The European Union owns Galileo.

Arianespace will launch four new satellites for the Galileo constellation, using two Ariane 62 versions of the next-generation Ariane 6 rocket from the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana. The European Space Agency (ESA) will conduct the contract on behalf of the European Commission (DG Growth) and the European Union (EU).

The launches are planned between the end of 2020 and mid-2021. The contract also provides for the possibility of using the Soyuz launch vehicle from the Guiana Space Center, if needed.

Both missions will carry a pair of Galileo spacecraft to continue the constellation deployment for Europe’s satellite-based navigation system. The satellites, each weighing approximately 750 kg, will be placed in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) at an altitude of 23,222 kilometers.

Galileo is the first joint infrastructure financed by the EU, which also will be the owner. A total of 18 Galileo satellites already are in orbit. Fourteen of these satellites were launched two at a time by Soyuz launchers, with the last four orbited on a single Ariane 5 ES mission in November 2016. Two more Ariane 5 ES missions are planned for December and in the summer of 2018.

In October of 1997, nearly 20 years ago, NASA launched the last of its great probes to the outer planets. A joint mission with the European Space Agency, a single rocket sent Cassini and Huygens on a meandering path through the Solar System. Huygens plunged into the atmosphere of the moon Titan well over a decade ago, but the Cassini orbiter has been looping around Saturn for over 13 years. But in less than 24 hours, its time at the ringed planet will come to a close as Cassini plunges into Saturn's atmosphere.

This was the end that NASA had always planned for its hardware. Some of Saturn's moons are thought to be capable of harboring life. So, rather than risk contaminating those moons with life from Earth, Cassini and any microbes it harbors will burn up on entry into Saturn's atmosphere.

The decision to do this now is based on the dwindling supply of fuel for the probe's maneuvering engines, which will eliminate NASA's ability to make further adjustments in its orbit. With the chaotic gravitational interactions of a giant planet and multiple moons, there'd be no way to determine where Cassini would end up. So NASA is acting while it still manages the hardware's destiny.

In the early morning hours on Friday, Cassini will cruise into Saturn’s upper atmosphere at tens of thousands of miles per hour, getting closer to the planet than ever before. The bus-sized orbiter, jostled by the dense atmosphere, will fire its thrusters to keep its antenna pointed at Earth and transmit data about the unexplored territory. The atmospheric forces will quickly become too powerful, and Cassini will begin to tumble. It will deploy emergency procedures to try to stabilize itself, but they won’t help. Cassini will start to break apart and, in less than a minute, disintegrate over Saturn’s cloud tops, like a meteorite streaking across the sky.

About 80 minutes later, Cassini’s final signals will reach antennae on Earth. The spacecraft’s end, a spectacular light show on Saturn, will play out on computer screens. The display resembles a heart monitor, with a skinny green spike signaling the strength of Cassini’s signal against a black background. At about 7:55 a.m. EDT, after 13 reliable years, the spike will vanish.

“I feel like I’m going to a hospice, watching somebody’s EKG, and waiting for their last heartbeat to come,” said Dick French, the principal investigator on the radio-science team responsible for talking to Cassini. “It’s going to be wrenching.”

French and several hundred mission members have gathered at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California this week to witness the “loss of signal,” a bittersweet end to a $3.26 billion mission. Cassini is running out of fuel. Scientists and engineers decided long ago that when the time came, they would crash the spacecraft into Saturn in an attempt to protect some of the ringed planet’s moons, particularly Enceladus and Titan, from earthly debris. Unlike Saturn, Enceladus and Titan are good candidates for harboring microbial life and NASA wants to keep them uncontaminated by humanity. In April, Titan’s gravity nudged Cassini into a trajectory that took the orbiter between Saturn and its rings, from which there was no return but only, as NASA puts it, a “grand finale.”

Cassini’s performance began in the early 1980s, when NASA and the European Space Agency convened groups of scientists to brainstorm a potential joint mission to Saturn. Proposals were solicited and submitted, and the U.S. Congress approved funding in 1989. Many members of the Voyager expedition, which was nearing the end of its decade-long tour of the outer planets, joined the mission. NASA would build the Cassini spacecraft, and ESA would build a lander called Huygens, destined for Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. In 1990, scientists held their first big meeting at JPL. “I don’t know if any of us could fathom at the time how extremely successful the mission would be,” said Bill Kurth, the principal investigator on the radio- and plasma-wave science team, which studies the environment around Saturn.

Perhaps that was because Cassini mission faced its greatest perils before it even left Earth. Each new year brought another round of potential budget cuts from Congress and fears that the project wouldn’t survive. The partnership with ESA, which was pouring millions of its own money into the project, made Congress less willing to gut it. “We were in this mission with the Europeans in what I would call the sink-or-swim mode,” said Darrell Strobel, an interdisciplinary scientist who has worked on the mission since 1983. “If either side withdrew its support for this mission, it would have been a failure.”

In 1992, NASA leadership, facing budget cuts, told engineers to rework their designs for the spacecraft to reduce costs by millions of dollars. Engineers removed platforms that would have allowed scientific instruments to move and point independently of each other, which meant the entire spacecraft would have to pivot to line up an experiment. As Cassini prepared to launch in 1997, protests sprang up over the mission’s use of plutonium-238, a fuel that can be used to build nuclear weapons or, in Cassini’s case, power a robot. Some worried that if Cassini were to explode during launch, the radioactive substance would be sprinkled through the air for miles.

Despite the controversy, the launch—plutonium-238 and all—went perfectly. “When you finally saw the thing leave ground, it’s honestly a miracle it happened,” Strobel said. Scientists spent the seven-year cruise to Saturn carefully planning out observations, how much time each team would get and when. Cassini was like a car with a camera glued to the hood. If scientists wanted to get a look at anything, engineers would have to steer the entire spacecraft over. “We could orbit Saturn this way or that way, and this would give us a chance to look at this moon, but then we couldn’t look at that moon, which would you like better?” French said. “Learning how to work with other teams as collaborators one day and as competition the next day for a different set of observations required that we develop political skills that not every scientist is born with.”

In 2000, scientists decided to take a sneak peek at Jupiter as Cassini flew past, using the gas giant’s gravitational pull as a boost. Scientific instruments were supposed to stay off until Cassini arrived in Saturn’s orbit, but where’s the fun in that? “So what we told NASA with a wink and a nod—that’s the way things are done—was ‘Well, this isn’t a science mission. We’re going to test out the instruments at Jupiter,’” said Mike Flasar, the principal investigator for Cassini’s composite infrared spectrometer, which measures infrared light to study the temperature and composition of objects.

Engineers spent years preparing for worst-case scenarios for Cassini’s entrance into Saturn’s orbit in July 2004, but the insertion went off without a hitch. After years of budget scares and hardware tweaks and plutonium protests, they were finally there. “I remember coming back in the morning just to catch those pictures as they were shown on the screen one by one,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini’s lead scientist. She felt she could almost “reach out and touch a ring particle.” Spilker has worked on Cassini for nearly 30 years, which, she points out, equals almost a single Saturn year.

In December 2004, Cassini released Huygens over Titan. For three weeks the lander was silent as it parachuted down. Jonathan Lunine, an interdisciplinary scientist, was inside a trailer in Germany with other scientists when the first photos came back to Earth. For several minutes, thumbnail after thumbnail flashed across their computer screens of alien surface. “We’d get a picture from a high altitude that didn’t really show anything, it was too hazy, and then suddenly we get a picture of gullies, which we didn’t know existed,” said Lunine, who has studied Titan since the early 1980s. “I screamed when I saw those.” On Earth, gullies are etched into rocky landscapes by flowing water. On Titan, they’re created by liquid methane.

Lunine and other scientists spent hours molding the thumbnails into a mosaic of a new world. “Being in isolation with these 20 other people in the middle of winter, in the middle of the night after this long day, putting together this mosaic of an alien world which I had wanted to see for over 20 years, I kind of began to get the feeling that I wasn’t in a trailer in Darmstadt, Germany,” he said. “I was in a trailer on the surface of Titan.”

The Huygens lander’s batteries died two hours after it touched town. Cassini went on to unleash what Spilker describes as a fire hose of information about the ringed planet and its moons. The spacecraft revealed, through stunning images and careful measurements, hurricanes on Saturn, methane lakes and seas on Titan, and water-vapor plumes erupting on Enceladus. French remembers conducting an experiment that required bouncing a radio signal off a Titan lake that, if it were smooth enough, would reflect the transmission directly at antennas on Earth. “Imagine that you’re driving a car toward the sun and you look at the hood of your car and you see the reflection bouncing off of the hood—that’s what we were trying to do,” he said. When it worked, French fell out of his chair.

The Cassini mission was only supposed to last four years. It was extended in 2008 for another two years, and again in 2010, this time until its fuel ran out. Strange as it may sound, the plan to crash Cassini into Saturn provided an exciting opportunity. The team didn’t need to be careful with it anymore. “The engineers, who’ve been so conservative and so cautious for decades, are allowing us to use the spacecraft in ways that would just have been too dangerous, to go places we never would have been allowed—in between the rings and close to the planet’s upper atmosphere and close to the edge of the known rings—and turn the spacecraft and do maneuvers with it that never would have been allowed,” said Larry Esposito, the principal investigator of ultraviolet-imaging spectrograph, which uses ultraviolet light to create images and study gases.

“It wasn’t a death spiral,” he said. “It was a new beginning.”

Cassini has returned some strange observations from its latest orbits. Scientists are getting “almost physically impossible" readings for the dynamics of the planet’s gravitational field, which they don’t yet understand, according to one researcher. The dust particles floating between the planet and its rings are tinier than they expected, and the atmosphere is denser than they predicted. They’re seeing all sorts of structures inside Saturn’s rings—clumps and streaks and waves—they didn’t expect to find.

Mission scientists will spend the next few years analyzing this data, looking for clues to some of Saturn’s biggest mysteries. Even after a 13-year trip to Saturn, humans still don’t know how massive its rings are, a measurement that could help reveal their age. Esposito, who has studied the planet’s ring system for more than 40 years, hopes Cassini’s final plunge will provide some answers.

But first, humanity must say goodbye. After years of anticipation, the end will be quick, almost jarring. In its silence, Cassini’s stewards will go on with their days. Some mission members say they’ll get breakfast when it’s over. Others plan to drive over to a big party at the California Institute of Technology during the day, and then to a soiree at someone’s home that night. Earl Maize, Cassini’s program director, said he might help take his grandchildren to school. His 7-year-old granddaughter recently gave him an origami Saturn. Maize wonders at how little the world knew about Saturn nearly three decades ago, and how much his grandkids know now.

“Saturn for them now is this dynamic, alive place,” Maize said. “And who knows, by the time they’re my age, what Saturn and the rest of the solar system’s going to look like.”

While robots began assisting and replacing assembly line workers in automobile and airplane factories years ago, humans still reign supreme in satellite manufacturing. But that’s slowly starting to change.

“For routine assembly process, we didn’t see the return on that given the quantity of operations we were performing.…It wasn’t high enough to really drive the need for too many robotics” — Brian Holz, OneWeb Satellites chief executive

In contrast to the millions of cars and thousands of airplanes produced annually, satellites — and geostationary telecommunications satellites in particular — are produced in much lower numbers. In a good year, the world’s satellite manufacturers might book a combined commercial 25 orders. That low volume limits the efficiency gained from industrial robots, at least on the ground.

“In terms of today, the uses for us are somewhat minimal,” said Tom Wilson, vice president of Orbital ATK’s Space Systems Group.

Orbital ATK mostly uses robotics to fit electronic boards with computer chips, Wilson said, which isn’t new for space or most other industries.

Even OneWeb’s mega-constellation, whose first satellites are just now being built by the OneWeb-Airbus joint venture OneWeb Satellites in Toulouse, France, doesn’t provide the scale needed to justify the upfront expense of automating assembly.

“For routine assembly process, we didn’t see the return on that given the quantity of operations we were performing,” said Brian Holz, OneWeb Satellites chief executive. “It wasn’t high enough to really drive the need for too many robotics.”

To build OneWeb’s order of 900 identical 150-kilogram satellites, Holz said the company is focusing more on the automation of repeatable processes, like placing cells onto solar arrays. Automating some manual procedures reduces the amount of touch labor involved and consequently, the risk of human error, but doesn’t mean a full-blown takeover by robotic builders.

“You’d get into more robotics maybe if you had another order of magnitude in terms of quantity of objects to build. We are not building one, but we’re not building a million either,” he said.

Making the case for robotics

These barriers to mainstream robotics don’t mean the industry isn’t investing in the technology, however. The European Space Agency has expressed great hope in bringing robotic capabilities to the clean rooms of satellite manufacturers.

“Within Europe, we see that the use of robots and automation is skyrocketing, especially in aeronautics,” said Paul Robert Nugteren, ESA’s technology and strategy coordinator for the agency’s

Directorate of Telecommunications & Integrated Applications. “Robot suppliers specifically cater for the specific needs of these industries. The step to spacecraft manufacturing is happening now. Collaborative robots are good candidates to make their first appearance in spacecraft manufacturing. European industries are developing their capabilities in this area.”

Thales Alenia Space used a robot called Saphir to automate the installation of inserts for the spacecraft-bus panels of Bangladesh’s Bangabandhu telecom satellite. The French and Italian satellite manufacturer anticipates Saphir will slash the time for bonding an estimated 3,500 inserts per panel from three weeks to one week, and the number of employees needed for the task from two to one.

Lockheed Martin uses robotic arms to take some of the tedium out of solar array assembly. A $350 million satellite factory the company expects to open by 2020 near Denver could potentially employ robotic helpers that deliver tools to the humans building the satellites. “We’re also developing how larger robotic arms can 3-D print structures with both additive and subtractive capabilities at the same station,” Lockheed Martin spokesman Mark Lewis said. “[O]ne arm deposits material while the other can shave off and smooth surfaces so it all can be done in one station, verses two different processes currently.”

SSL, Estey said, has developed “an industrial robot-like device” to assist with building satellite subsystems.

“We are beginning to use that now,” he said. “If that works out as we hope, we are going to expand the use of that type of a robot elsewhere in the factory.”

Frédéric Teston, head of ESA’s Systems Department Directorate of Technology, Engineering and Quality, said the agency expects a lot of automation from the aviation and automotive industries will “spin-in” over time to the satellite industry. Despite the challenges, constellations of tens, hundreds, or thousands of satellites are viewed by the agency as “the first candidates for extensive automation and use of robotics.”

“Experience build-up in constellations will then make its way to lower-volume production cases,” he said.

Downstream currents

Suppliers of satellite parts and subsystems are also guided by volume in determining whether or not robotics have any meaningful application.

Nuvotronics, a Durham, North Carolina-headquartered provider of amplifiers, space-qualified phased-array antennas, filters, diplexers, and other components, has been rapidly introducing robotics to create more reliable products, circumventing human error, said President David Sherrer.

“Over the last two years, we have moved most of the key steps in our manufacturing to use robotic handlers,” he said. “Human operators do not need to touch the work in process except to move batches from operation to operation.”

Sherrer said robotic handlers operate without human intervention for several of Nuvotronic’s machining processes, such as metal filling, removing disposable design molds from parts, and assembly of smaller parts into hardware.

“What used to take 10 minutes of human touch-time to fixture a substrate to grow metal into a layer is now done hands-off, including the pre-cleaning and post wash and dry steps,” he said. “The ability for these machines to run 24/7 without making errors translates into reduced cost and higher yield.”

That process used to take 10 minutes; it now takes about 30 seconds, he said.

In contrast, Melbourne, Florida-based Harris Corp.’s Space and Intelligence Systems division, a provider of large, unfurlable satellite antennas, builds only a couple of such antennas every year. Over the past 50 years, the company has produced around 80 antenna reflectors, of which around 50 are unfurlable.

Tom Campbell, Harris Corp.’s director of program management for antennas and structures, said a typical antenna project takes 14 to 30 months to complete. Half of that time is design, he said, while the other half is the actual build process.

Campbell said automation has led to some decrease in the number of humans working on a project, but added that Harris has “been able to grow the business to take up the need for additional people.”

“It’s important to have a critical mass so that when customers call on us, we are ready to go,” he said.

Harris is using a lot of automation on the design side by adding antenna modeling code to computer-aided-design tools in order to better define final products, Campbell said. The company is also “very bullish” on 3-D printing to create structures “that are maybe an order of magnitude more optimized for the purpose at hand,” he said.

Robotics have limited use so far, but have found some applications in areas such as carbon-tube wrapping, he said, and in test equipment. Scale remains the biggest challenge.

“The instances of true high-volume manufacturing are still few and far between,” he said. “I think the industrial engineers are still favoring lean processes in most cases as we still tend to build most satellites one at a time.”

Robotics in space

Both Orbital ATK and SSL are developing robotic servicers for in-orbit repair and life extension. Toward the end of 2018, Wilson said, Orbital ATK subsidiary Space Logistics plans to launch its first mission-extension vehicle, or MEV-1, which will serve Intelsat for an initial five years. SSL parent company MDA Corp. is creating a company called Space Infrastructure Services, or SIS, that expects to launch a robotic servicer in 2021 based on a project with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The two companies have different visions of how to approach in-orbit servicing as a business, and have quarreled in legal disputes over the technology in recent years, but both envision their products as kicking off what would rightly be called a paradigm shift if fully realized.

“Things like deep space gateways or large telecommunications satellites that you couldn’t fit in a launch vehicle fairing because of their size and the amount of power, [that’s what] we are talking about,” said Orbital ATK’s Wilson. “The idea is you can have a very-high-power system that can last for multiple decades that can be assembled on orbit with some of the technology we are developing. It’s more of a future look.”

Some of that critical technology is being produced through a NASA Tipping Point contract for the Commercial Infrastructure for Robotic Assembly and Services program, which Orbital ATK has been working on since September 2016.

Joe Anderson, leader of business development for Orbital ATK’s Advanced Programs Group, said NASA extended the project through to a ground demonstration in fall 2018, which will practice, among other things, how to add, remove and relocate structures such as solar panels.

“We are hopeful that next year NASA would come out with their phase two, which would be [ a Request for Proposal] for an in-orbit demo,” he said. “We are looking forward to that. NASA seems to be very interested.”

In February, DARPA picked SSL to build the platform for the Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites, which SSL’s Space Infrastructure Services subsidiary will market commercially after completing demonstrations for the agency. SSL also has a NASA Tipping Point contract for a program called Dragonfly meant to advance technology for the in-space assembly and repair of satellite antennas.

“Certainly in 10 years we are going to be using robotic assembly in orbit,” SSL’s Estey said. “The persistent platform is a good example where you’ve got modules you launch separately but are put together on orbit. That definitely in our opinion is going to happen.”

The persistent platform is a concept where a satellite bus stays in orbit indefinitely, and is updated using new payloads and technologies launched as parts. Robotic servicers would then plug in those payloads and remove broken or obsolete components to “refresh” the platform as needed.

“The application of robotics is much more applicable in the on-orbit assembly world and in [satellite] servicing … once we get to being able to be very capable of that, we see a complete change in the satellite architecture,” said Estey.

Persistent platforms could grow to be substantially larger than what can fit in a rocket’s payload fairing, enabling gigantic satellites or other spacecraft to be constructed on orbit. SSL, 3-D printing startup Made In Space, and Orbital ATK are all working on robotic in-space manufacturing systems that could enable such structures.

Anderson said Orbital ATK is evaluating a structure it calls the “GEO tower,” which would be a “multiple-decade-type application that would provide all of the backbone for communications payloads… just like a cell tower today.”

Multiple telecom operators could install payloads on the tower, and swap those payloads based on changes in technology and demand. GEO towers could also be used for Earth observation, assembling in orbit an aperture large enough to provide the resolution needed from the far away vantage point of GEO.

Wilson said Orbital ATK is still developing the technology and possible business plans for GEO towers, which could then be maintained using robotic servicing spacecraft. SN

Paris (SPX) Sep 12, 2017
Airbus has been contracted by the European Space Agency (ESA) to produce a demonstrator for the future European Governmental Satellite Communications (GOVSATCOM) programme. Supported by the European Commission, the European Defence Agency (EDA) and ESA, GOVSATCOM aims to provide key European countries, organisations and operators with secured satellite communication services. The programme shoul Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство

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Scientists use mismatch in telescopic data to get a handle on quasars and their 'tails'

Scientists have determined the properties of ionized jets of matter ejected by supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei. They analyzed unexpected discrepancies between the data of high-precision observations conducted by an international network of radio telescopes and that of Gaia—a space observatory of the European Space Agency equipped with optical telescopes. Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство

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NASA's Cassini probe is about to plunge to its doom — and its fiery death may be visible to telescopes on Earth

On Friday, NASA is destroying its Cassini spacecraft at Saturn to prevent contaminating the planet's moons.

The fireball in Saturn's clouds should be visible to telescopes in space or on the ground.

NASA can't use the Hubble Space Telescope to photograph the probe's destruction, but astronomers on the ground might catch a glimpse of a flash.

Early on Friday morning, NASA's Cassini probe will meet its doom as it becomes a streak of plutonium-laced fireworks in the clouds of Saturn.

The nuclear-powered robot was launched in 1997 year to deeply study Saturn and its mysterious collection of moons. Cassini arrived in 2004, dropped off a lander on one moon, and has orbited Saturn and beamed back data and images to Earth ever since.

Scientists would love to keep the $3.26-billion mission going, but their robot has gotten too low on propellant to safely control. Extending the mission would risk crashing Cassini — which is contaminated with trace amounts of earthly bacteria — into Enceladus or Titan. These two moons of Saturn hide oceans of water and may be habitable to or even host alien life.

Instead of chucking the probe into deep space, like the twin Voyager spacecraft, NASA decided to destroy Cassini by sending it on a months-long death spiral into Saturn.

This daring maneuver — what NASA calls "the Grand Finale" — gave Cassini 22 unprecedented dives between Saturn and its gossamer-thin rings.

As NASA prepares to lose one of its most storied space probes, many space enthusiasts are wondering whether Cassini's final moments will be visible from Earth, 930 million miles away.

Business Insider posed that question to Linda Spilker, a Cassini project scientist and a planetary scientist at NASA JPL. Her answer: "It's gonna be tough, but I'm hopeful."

Why it will be so difficult to see Cassini burn up

When Cassini plunges into Saturn's outer atmosphere at about 76,000 mph, it should produce bursts of light. But that'll be tough to see from Earth for a few reasons.

First, the brightest parts of those bursts will be in ultraviolet — the same wavelength of light that can cause sunburn. Because Earth's ozone layer soaks up gobs of ultraviolet light, however, any UV flashes will appear dramatically dimmed to anyone watching from the ground.

Another challenge is that Cassini's two nexuses of control — NASA and the European Space Agency — won't "see" the event in the dark of night, making the signal all the much dimmer as western telescopes fight twilight.

"There are really no big assets that we could be to bear either in the United States or in Europe to look," Spilker told Business Insider. "It's going to be five in the morning here, and of course even later in the day in Europe."

Because of those factors, Spilker said this moment in space history won't be like seeing the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet wallop Jupiter in 1994.

"Those objects were so much bigger and so much more massive than Cassini, and a lot of those strikes were on the night side. We've got sort of the double-whammy of a little tiny spacecraft that's really not that massive hitting on basically the day side of Saturn," Spilker said. "So it's unlikely, but it's definitely worth looking."

Space is the ideal place to record Cassini's fiery death, since the sun and Earth's atmosphere wouldn't be in the way. So, the Cassini mission asked NASA to use the Hubble Space Telescope to stare down Saturn for signs of a flash.

This could have worked, but Spilker said a recent discovery at Saturn led to a poor "luck of the draw" with Hubble.

During Cassini's last handful of dives between Saturn and its rings, the probe revealed that the planet's outer atmosphere extends farther than previously thought. Plowing through those sparse gases gradually slowed down Cassini — and this, in turn, bumped up the probe's time of death by about 15 to 20 minutes, Spilker said.

"It's really just in the last few weeks that we've started to get a better handle on what that time of impact would be," Spilker said.

When NASA studied this new timing, it realized Cassini would burn up while Hubble is flying over Earth's South Atlantic anomaly — a chink in the armor of our planet's protective shield where radiation levels and electric currents spike.

"We were trying to get some time on Hubble, but it looks like ... the instrument we want to use will have to be turned off when we're flying across that region," Spilker said. "You don't want to have currents flowing at high voltage. You worry about damage to your instruments, so the best thing you can do is turn off high voltage."

She added: "I was sad to lose Hubble, because above [Earth's] atmosphere looking in the ultraviolet, that was a good chance. And it just didn't work."

Southern astronomers to the rescue?

But Spilker thinks all hope is not lost.

She said there's a chance that professional, ground-based telescopes in the southern hemisphere — perhaps those in Australia or Taiwan — might be sensitive enough and in the right place to record Cassini's death.

She also said there's a large community of space fans with powerful telescopes and refined techniques sprinkled across the globe that could help.

"There's still some really great, really capable amateur ground astronomers, in particular, that have returned some beautiful images of Saturn," Spilker said, reiterating that it will be a "tough one" to capture.

"Maybe the last of the fuel tank will suddenly brighten and we'll be able to see that. I think it's definitely worth looking," she said. "We might be surprised."

The sensational Cassini spacecraft is set for its grand finale plunge into Saturn starting 04:37 am EDT on Friday, September 15th. Final communication and craft disintegration is expected to occur 1,510 km above Saturn cloud tops at 07:54 am.

As outlined in the September 8th, 2017 NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory video post, "NASA's Cassini Spacecraft: A Journey's End," the epic, thirteen year Cassini mission to Saturn is coming to a close. On Sept. 15, the spacecraft "will make a planned plunge into the atmosphere of Saturn in order to protect pristine icy moons that warrant future exploration." Screenshot c/o JPL.

Cassini data will continue to provide revolutionary insight into Saturn, its complex rings, magnetic environment, giant storms, Solar System evolution and moons Enceladus with its icy jets and Titan liquid ethane and methane lakes and seas.

Launched together with Cassini on October 15th, 1997 the Huygens probe provided the first close up images of Titan and is the only landing accomplished in outer Solar System.

A joint effort of NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Italian Space Agency, the development of Cassini began in 1980s and thousands of people have contributed, many dedicating most of their careers to the significant mission.

As Cassini winds down, the NASA New Horizons spacecraft is expected to wake up on September 11th, 2017 for tests and instrument checks prior to its upcoming encounter with Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) 2017 MU69 at 12,500 km or closer on January 1st, 2019.

Recent observations indicate the KBO, discovered in June 2014 about 44 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun, could be a primordial 4-billion year old binary object with two lobes of diameters 20 and 18 km. New Horizons has the potential to observe around 20 other KBOs if the mission is extended further.

According to principal investigator Alan Stern (BL), "new exploration awaits us and promises a scientific bonanza for the flyby."

Airbus has been tapped by the European Space Agency to build a demonstrator system that would enable dynamic sharing of government satellite capabilities between European Union member states for the purposes of the future European Governmental Satellite Communications (GOVSATCOM) secure communications program.

Airbus said the ground segment demonstrator would be based on the Newtec Dialog technology developed by Belgian company Newtec and will be installed at the Airbus site in Toulouse, Frence. The two-year contract also includes further developments to improve the Newtec technology.

According to Airbus, the innovation will enable mobile users to switch transparently from one satellite beam to another without jeopardizing the confidentiality of their operations.

ESA develops GOVSATCOM jointly with the European Defence Agency (EDA) and the European Commission. The European Commission initiated the GOVSATCOM program in 2013 in recognition that only a few European countries own dedicated governmental satellites they could use for military communications or disaster management. Instead, governments have to compete for commercially available satellite capacity in situations that require immediate action.

In June this year, EDA’s Steering Board approved the first step in the GOVSATCOM development — a demonstration of pooling and sharing of satellite capabilities between participating governments.

Fourteen EU member states plus Norway participate in the GOVSATCOM demonstration under the leadership of Spain.

The GOVSATCOM program is the European Union’s attempt to create a single system enabling easy access to secure, reliable and affordable satellite communications services to all its member states.

While looking for an integrated pan-European solution similar to the global navigation satellite system Galileo or the Earth-observation program Copernicus, it is unlikely that GOVSATCOM would eventually expand into building a dedicated satellite constellation, ESA representatives said earlier this year.

The demonstration was preceded by two studies conducted between 2015 and 2017 that evaluated the needs of the European government users and looked at the major gaps in the accessibility of secure satellite communications services.

Paris (ESA) Sep 11, 2017
The international Cassini-Huygens mission has explored Saturn and its rings and moons for 13 years, and will conclude by plunging into the planet's atmosphere next week. This article highlights some of the mission's exciting discoveries led by European teams.
Cassini is an international programme: a collaboration between NASA, ESA and Italy's ASI space agency plus several separate European acad Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Космическое агентство Италии, Европейское космическое агентство

The CubeSat arena is growing fast — Spaceworks’ latest market assessment predicts an 80 percent increase in CubeSat launches this year compared to 2016. However, according to EnduroSat founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Raycho Raychev, the nascent market is still plagued with poor quality control and unusually long delivery times for such a small form factor. To address these issues, the two-year-old Bulgarian startup has developed a production scheme that allows it to guarantee delivery of a CubeSat module in five days or less.

“CubeSats open amazing opportunity for many new players to enter the space sector — universities, private companies and even smaller space agencies and institutes have access to space through CubeSat technology,” Raychev said. “On the other hand … basically everyone says the CubeSat democratizes the market but the price level and performance levels still make CubeSats themselves quite inaccessible to many potential users of the technology.”

Raychev said he saw a business opportunity in more adequately meeting the needs of these customers, most of whom lack experience in working with space-related technology. Although EnduroSat does integrate hardware components such as Central Processing Units (CPUs) from other companies, the key to ensuring consistent quality control and rapid delivery times, he said, was bringing as much work as possible in-house. “There is no black magic in our approach. EnduroSat has invested a lot of resources and time to close-loop the entire product cycle, from conceptualization to design and engineering of the satellite systems to production under extremely strict conditions,” Raychev said.

Raycho Raychev, founder and CEO of EnduroSat. Photo: EnduroSat.

EnduroSat has stuck fast to its five-day guarantee, and also places emphasis on customizing each CubeSat bus to each individual mission. Customers only need to integrate their payloads once the platform arrives. This “plug-and-play” approach has proved attractive to customers in the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia as well, Raychev said, as it further simplifies the process for researchers, for example, who are unfamiliar with the world of satellites.

According to Raychev, EnduroSat is optimistic about a future where CubeSats become an integral part of businesses beyond the space industry. “When CubeSat players can tangibly prove that the data they could provide has concrete value for improving ground-based businesses, the industry will really take off,” he said.

But Raychev also said he strongly believes CubeSats could soon play a significant role in space exploration, especially in the context of near-Earth objects and celestial bodies such as the Moon. “The more the technology matures, the more resilient the systems become, the better the CubeSat solution is for space exploration,” he said.

As an example, Raychev said he could foresee a day when CubeSats are used for a navigational system operating in Low-Moon Orbit. “The CubeSat could be the perfect testbed for such technologies,” he said.

CubeSat companies such as EnduroSat have become increasingly courageous in their long-term business goals due to the low cost of entry into the market compared to other, more capital-intensive businesses such as launch. Eastern Europe in particular is a hotbed for such startups because it is already “a successful hub when it comes to the IT sector,” Raychev said. “I think this momentum could help the creation of a vibrant space industry. Leveraging the capabilities of the engineering force and the entrepreneurship culture that exists locally open a sensible case for creating competitive space companies in the region.”

Bulgaria specifically is currently undergoing negotiations to become a full-time member of the European Space Agency (ESA), Raychev said. This speaks to the country’s vested interest in developing its own space economy based on private initiatives in the region — as well as the willingness Raychev has observed from investors to inject capital into young tech-focused startups. “On the fundraising side, I could easily say that EnduroSat has had an amazing experience so far. The investors that we managed to attract come from our region, which we’re really proud of,” he said.

As part of the European Union’s (EU) Horizon 2020 program, EnduroSat recently received a 2 million euro ($1.19 million) grant to initiate the InnoSpaceComm project. According to Raychev, the project’s main goal is to develop next-generation space communications systems and services for the CubeSat and MicroSat markets to lower the cost of LEO communications. “EnduroSat’s mission is to provide the communication infrastructure and educational program supporting it so that start-up companies could focus directly on the Earth-based applications, services and data,” Raychev said.

With Hurricane Irma already a major hurricane — defined as a Category 3 or above storm by the National Hurricane Center — the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season has seen four hurricanes (two major ones, Harvey and Irma) and nine named storms before the start of September.

"We're a way ahead of schedule for named storms," Phil Klotzbach, a meteorologist at Colorado State University who specializes in Atlantic hurricane forecasts, told Business Insider.

Hurricane season doesn't hit its peak until September 10 and normally, the average date of the fourth hurricane in a year is September 21.

"Typically, about 55% of hurricane activity occurs after September 1," Michael Ventrice, a meteorological scientist at The Weather Company (the group behind the Weather Channel and Weather Underground) told Business Insider. "Everything is continuing to point to an active season."

The Weather Company's most recent updated forecast predicted 17 named storms, nine hurricanes, and said four of those would be major. CSU most recently predicted 16 named storms, eight hurricanes, and said three of those would be major.

"I think all in all, we're still on track for an above-average season. The tropical Atlantic is warmer than normal right now, and vertical wind shear (the change in wind direction with height) has been pretty weak," said Klotzbach. "It's been a bit drier than normal which has tended to suppress storm activity in the deep tropics over the past few weeks, but that looks to be changing... just in time for Irma."

#Irma is now a major hurricane - the 2nd of 2017 Atlantic hurricane season & the first time since 2010 we've had 2 major hurricanes by 8/31. pic.twitter.com/RwPq9hrj1B

Irma is making a long journey across the Atlantic that will test prediction science, according to Ventrice.

A number of models have Irma headed a bit further north than the Gulf, either pointed towards the East Coast or potentially turning away. But Ventrice said that "some of the better performing model's that are correctly handling [Irma's] initial formation are more favorable towards the Gulf of Mexico," the region that has already suffered through Harvey.

"It could be the strongest hurricane of the year," he said.

While conditions have been particularly favorable to hurricane formation recently, Ventrice said that wouldn't necessarily remain the case throughout the season. The Weather Channel predicts a dip in activity right around the theoretical peak, sometime after Irma.

But even if that lull occurs and lasts for two to three weeks, he said "we could very well see another active period as we move towards the final week of September."

By that point in time, Ventrice said he expected the conditions causing storms to form off the coast of Africa could come to an end, but we could see an uptick in storms forming in the Caribbean.

The climatological peak doesn't mean it'll always be the strongest time of year for storms just because it's the annual average, he said. You might hit a lull then instead — but that doesn't mean things are over.

Another measure that meteorologists use to track the force of storms we've experienced so far is accumulated cyclone energy (ACE), which takes into account the number of storms we've seen, how powerful they've been, and how long they lasted, according to Klotzbach. By that standard, 2017 has been fairly average so far, though he said that Irma could very quickly make it an "above average" year.

Since that measure usually jumps significantly after this point, Klotzbach said it's an indication of more storms ahead.

Through Aug. 30, Atlantic Accumulated Cyclone Energy in 2017 is near long-term average. Looks like it could jump significantly with #Irmapic.twitter.com/JQWN1Zd67e

Essex, UK (SPX) Sep 01, 2017
eledyne e2v has been awarded a multimillion euro contract by OHB System AG to supply customised Charge Coupled Device (CCD) image sensors for the Fluorescence Explorer (FLEX) satellite mission, under a programme of and funded by the European Space Agency (ESA).
The FLEX mission, which is the eighth in ESA's Earth Explorer programme, is scheduled to launch in 2022. For the first time, it wi Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство, E2v

In these days of digital media, it's easy to overlook the art of print ads. But the medium is still as relevant and powerful as vintage posters ever were, whether small scale magazine ads or huge billboard advertising.

No matter what the medium, you still need a concept that's going to stick in people's minds. We think these examples of print advertising do just that.

01. KFC

Kill it. Kill it with fire

If there's one thing we all know about KFC, it's that it's finger-lickin' good, and it's this irrefutable fact that's inspired this series of frankly unsettling print ads. In them, everyday objects suddenly sprout mouths wherever your fingers might touch them, in the hope of licking off a little of the Colonel's chickeny goodness. It's the work of Zane Zhou, along with LamanoStudio in Chile. Thanks for tonight's nightmares, guys.

02. Kiss with Pride

Thought-provoking stuff from Absolut

It's been 50 years since homosexuality was decriminalised in England and Wales, but today it's still illegal in 72 countries around the world – and punishable by death in eight. To highlight this fact, Absolut, in collaboration with LGBTQ charity Stonewall and BBH London, created this series featuring close-up shots of same-sex kisses, with many of the subjects coming from the countries where these kisses could land them in prison, or worse.

03. Pass the Heinz

Feeling a sense of déjà vu?

If these clever adverts for Heinz look kind of familiar, it's with good reason. They originally featured in an episode of Mad Men where Don Draper tried to pitch a series of ads showing food that goes great with ketchup, but without the ketchup itself visible. Draper argued that people would fill in the gaps for themselves and create a stronger association in their mind, but Heinz wasn't going for it. Now, however, the company's changed its mind and, with DAVID Miami, rolled out these near-exact reproductions of Draper's pitch; talk about a man ahead of his time.

04. Burger King

Maybe get a takeaway rather than eat in, yeah?

Burger King prides itself on flame-grilling its burgers rather than frying them, but we all know how fire can misbehave if you don't keep a close eye on it, right? Burger King holds the record for the most restaurants that have burned down since 1954, and that's the brilliant angle seized by DAVID Miami in one of its many innovative campaigns for the company, using genuine photos of blazing BKs to emphasise how it cooks its burgers.

05. Delta Dating Wall

Most of this print ad was hand-painted by Colossal Media

According to Delta, world travellers are more likely to attract right swipes on Tinder, but what if you can't afford to go away to snap that perfect profile pic? That's what Delta – along with Wieden + Kennedy New York and Colossal Media – addresses with the Delta Dating Wall, an epic advert in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, featuring exotic backdrops that you can stand against for a selfie, instantly making you a lot more windswept and interesting.

06. Chambord

Like a randomly placed cabbage? Go for it! No reason needed.

Wieden+Kennedy London was tasked with raising the profile of Chambord among a target audience of women aged 24-35. It used the campaign to push back against the pressure on women to conform to certain rules with its "Because No Reason" tagline that encourages people to do what they like, just because they like it.

07. TK Maxx

It's true: there is crazy knitwear in TK Maxx

You never know what you'll find when you go shopping in TK Maxx, and this aspect of the designer discount shop is brought to the fore by this campaign emphasising the "ridiculous possibilities" that lie inside.

08. Jeep

Deer or penguin? You decide.

The meaning of the tagline "See whatever you want to see" is smartly turned on its head with a series of images that can be seen in two ways: one way it's a deer, the other way it's a penguin.

09. Penguin Audiobooks

The Miami Ad School saves paper with this clever print ad

You've got to give it to the Miami Ad School – taking a company that have made their worth through the selling of paper books, this print ad is a bold step but one that we think works really well. The intricate illsutration in the bark is a lovely touch.

10. Gripex

Ogilvy & Mather lend their talents to another successful print ad

Ogilvy & Mather once again prove themselves as print advertisement masters with this clever approach to allergy medicine. Using simple yet effective colours and simple illustrations means that this is an ad that pops from the page.

11. UNEP: Skyline

This print ad brings the message of global warming home

Print advertisments raising awareness of important causes such as global warming have to be instantly striking. This offering from Vinay Saya and Siddarth Basavaraj cleverly uses Photoshop to produce a skyline within the ice. Bringing the campaign closer to home will enable the viewer to recognise the message quicker and more effectively.

12. Fevikwik Instant Adhesive: Teapot

The monochrome colour scheme perfectly compliments the output

Ogilvy & Mather are known for creating some of the best print advertisements around the world. This is just another example of their brilliant work. Created for Fevikwik Instant Adhesive, it's one of a three-part print advertisement series that uses clever illustration and a monochrome colour scheme to its fullest potential.

13. Rolling Stone

Rock music meets photoshop with this simple and sleek print ad

Created by DLV BBDO in Milan, Italy, this simple execution works wonders for music magazine Rolling Stone. With a brilliant tag line 'We are made of rock,' the brand's attitudes, product and ethos are effortlessly put across with this print advertisement. Using a signature-like font also showcases the rock star aesthetic.

14. Ashtanga Yoga

This brilliantly inventive ad hones in on the benefits of yoga practise for your back

Created by Israel based advertising agency McCann Erickson, this print ad for Ashtanga Yoga hones in on the benefits of yoga practise for your back. With a tag line "Before your back attacks you, Ashtanga Yoga at the Garage fitness club", it's a brilliantly inventive ad.

15. Clinica Mosquera

We love how Ecuador advertising agency BBA has applied playful imagery to a sore subject

Although this print advertisement might be a bit too graphic for some, we love how Ecuador advertising agency BBA has applied playful imagery to a sore subject. The 3D rendering is brilliant with everything from the colour to the shading popping out of the page.

16. Penguin Books

Last year, Penguin Books promoted its audiobooks with a brilliant print ad campaign featuring illustrations of three well known authors - William Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde - acting as headphones and whispering in the ears of their listeners.

Developed by team at McCann Worldgroup India, the campaign went on to won a Gold Press Lion at Cannes International Festival of Creativity

17. Moms Demand Action

Moms Demand Action as if a Kinder Egg is banned in the US to protect children, why not assault weapons?

Moms Demand Action, a collective of mothers calling for gun law reform, was behind this hard-hitting ad campaign, which focused on children in schools.

'Choose One' features children carrying weapons, alongside classmates holding either a Kinder Surprise egg, the book 'Little Red Riding Hood' and a ball from the schoolyard game Dodgeball. One child is holding something that's been banned in America to protect them, with the audience asked to guess which one.

18. Expedia

This ingenious pad campaign by Ogilvy & Mather for travel brand Expedia uses airport IATA codes to great effect. The idea came about after the team noticed a woman walking through Heathrow with the word FUK hanging off her suitcase.

With over 9,000 airports around the world, each with its own three-letter code to choose from, the team created a series of prints, using a tagline in the form of passport stamp, which says 'Find whatever floats your boat'.

19. Whiskas

The 'Big Cat, Small Cat' campaign depicts a small furry feline as a big cat in the wild

Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO Whiskas campaign features a household cat in various scenarios in the wild of Africa. Highlighting the basic instincts in a cat, the clever 'Big Cat, Small Cat' campaign was shot by photographer George Logan.

Depicting a small furry feline as a big cat in the wild, the series of prints include the domestic animal hunting down gazelles, elephants and zebras in the wild. And we're particularly fond of the ad that shows fully grown male lion bonding with the same cat as if they were family.

20. Mini

We love this clever Halloween-inspired Mini campaign

When you have such an iconic product as the Mini, you don't always have to do something particularly clever or involved to make your point. And this silly campaign, casting the much-loved motor in an uncharacteristically sinister light, struck just the right note of fun for us last Halloween.

21. WWF

BBDO Spain created this powerful print ad to highlight the issue of extinction

Earlier this month, BBDO Spain released this powerful print ad campaign for the World Wildlife Fund. Featuring a white polar bear in a garage workshop, the aim is to highlight that there are no tools that can fix extinction.

22. Velo marathon

AD McCann Vilnius designed this clever print ad for the annual Velo marathon

We love this design for the European Velo Marathon, an annual biking event in which around 10,000 cyclists take part. Designed by McCann Erickson, Lithuania, the clever concept features a city-like scene set on the gears of a bike, accompanied by the tagline 'Move the City'.

23. Volkswagen

Turn on your adventure with this new print ad campaign for Volkswagen

To advertise the fact that you can get more than 620 miles out of single tank of fuel with Volkswagen's Amarok, ad agency Below developed a series of print ads, inviting people to 'turn on adventure'. The clever concept features three images with the groves of the car keys transformed into a city, safari and mountain landscape.

24. Alzas Bajas magazine

This beautiful print ad was developed by JWT for Argentinian magazine Alzas Bajas

This beautiful print ad was developed by JWT, Buenos Aires for Argentinian magazine Alzas Bajas. The team created four paper art images, including this gorgeous wildlife scene. Each are accompanied a small amount of explanatory text followed by the tagline 'more information, less risk'.

25. McDonald's

TBWA Shanghai developed this cool new print ad featuring a box of fries carved out of a potato

McDonald's is constantly coming up with innovative new ways of advertising, this brilliant print ad being its latest offering. The eye-catching design, created by TBWA Shanghai, features a box of fries, carved from the very ingredient from which they're made.

Next page: 25 more brilliant examples of print ads

26. Duracell

We love print ads that come out of left field - and this is certainly one of them

Terrifying but brilliant, this is one of those print ads that shouldn't work but somehow does. The advertisement for Duracell features a sinister-looking doll in the doorway of a little girl's playroom, accompanied by the tagline 'Some toys never die'.

Developed by advertising agency Grey in Singapore, this is certainly a unique way to promote longer-lasting batteries. It's a bit left-field, and completely terrifying, but we love it nonetheless.

27. Dog Chow

There aren't many print ads that treat dogs so badly - but no animals were harmed in the making of this commercial

The best print ads manage to combine brilliant art direction whilst still maintaining the brand's image and ethos. And here's a great example that instantly put a smile on our faces.

Dog Chow is a brand new dog food from Purina and Columbian designer Cristhian Ramírez was tasked with creating a series of ads for its latest campaign, entitled 'Stop treating your dog like a trashcan'. The creative director and head of art at Publicis, Ramírez produced a number of striking character designs that really hit home when it comes to the health of your dog.

28. SANCCOB

A species in rapid decline, the African penguin needs help. South African advertising agency Bittersuite and SANCOOB, a non-profit organisation that aims to protect threatened seabirds, recently developed this innovative series of print ads to raise awareness of the penguin's critical situation.

Inspired by the artwork of Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, two of the designs feature clever optical illusions to draw the viewer in for a closer look and get their message across. The third draws inspiration from optometrists' eye charts, featuring a timeline of different sized penguins to show the decline in the species.

29. Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF)

The cartoon-style characters and graphics in these print ads maintain a fun, tongue-in-cheek element

Each of the five print ads features a gorgeous illustration and the tagline 'Get in touch with your inner child'. Some of the drawings contain mature content but the cartoon-style characters and graphics maintain a fun, tongue-in-cheek element to the campaign.

30. Dumb Ways to Die

From digital to print - Dumb Ways to Die works perfectly with both

Back in November, Melbourne Australia's Metro train system decided to take a different approach to public safety video. Their ad 'Dumb Ways to Die' – featuring animated characters playing out the lyrics of a comedy song about idiotic deaths – quickly became a viral hit and won a series of awards. The campaign, created in conjunction with Melbourne ad agency McCann, has now inspired a series of print ads - and they're just as brilliant. We love how the cuteness of the character designs is balanced by the goriness of their deaths.

31. Publinews Braille Edition

Lady Gaga's illustration is accompanied by the braille caption 'She recovers in a golden wheelchair', which refers to her recent request for one after hip surgery

International journal Publinews recently commissioned ad agency el Taier/Tribu DDB and creative director Jorge Solórzano to create a set of prints to advertise its braille edition. The minimalist ads feature illustrations of Lady Gaga, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong, Lionel Messi and Pope Francisco among delicate fingerprints. Each is accompanied by a caption relating to recent news about each individual.

32. Wacom Bamboo

Creativity has no boundaries in this new print campaign for Wacom Bamboo

To promote design tablet king Wacom's popular Bamboo products, art director and illustrator Maria Molina developed this set of prints under the tagline 'Creativity has no boundaries'. The series includes three illustrations, each featuring various designer tools with a twist. Bright colours, minimal text and simple graphics work perfectly together in this campaign.

33. Holes

Ad agency Grey New York developed this hard-hitting print campaign for non-profit organisation States United to Prevent Gun Violence

This hard-hitting print ad campaiging against gun violence comes from advertising and marketing agency Grey New York. The campaign, which features three human targets, including a small baby, calls for an update to the USA's antiquated gun laws. The ad, commissioned by non-profit organisation States United to Prevent Gun Violence, features the tagline 'Bullets leave bigger holes than you think'.

34. SMS mistype

Get the message?

We all know the dangers of using a mobile phone while driving. But we really like the simple but clever way ad agency Gitam BBDO points out the obvious facts in this road safety message from car manufacturer Opel. The cool print has a black background, replicating a phone while at the same time making the white box of text all the more prominent. A simple but really effective concept.

35. Pie Chart

The Guardian shows its readers that with its publication they get the full story

UK newspaper The Guardian recently commissioned advertising agency BBH London to create this eye-catching print to show its readers they get the full story. The print is clean and cleverly designed to convey its message. With a purple background, the piece features a simple pie chart, The Guardian logo and a legend with the words 'the whole picture' next to each colour.

36. Dallas Farmers Market

Fresh veg makes up a box of fries in this clever campaign for Dallas Farmers Market

Healthy foods at affordable prices. That's the message behind this clever campaign from ad agency Firehouse for Dallas Farmers Market. Illustrations of fresh fruit and veg cleverly make up a box of fries, hamburger, bag of sweets, and an ice cream in the series of colourful posters.

37. Powers Whiskey

Taylor James and Andy Glass joined forces to create this cool print campaign for Powers Whiskey

Powers is the second biggest whiskey brand in the Republic of Ireland. To promote it, photographer Andy Glass collaborated with creative production studio Taylor James, resulting in a series of gorgeous prints depicting its honey notes, earthy tones and distinctive barley essence. The Taylor James team integrated Glass's landscape photography into the liquid and retouched the four images to create a beautifully photorealistic look for the outdoor print campaign.

38. Schusev State Museum of Architecture

Discover the full story of some of Russia's most famous buildings at the Schusev State Museum of Architecture

This beautiful illustration of St Basil's church in Moscow was created by ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi to promote the information available at the Schusev State Museum of Architecture. The campaign features a series of beautiful photographs of famous Russian landmarks, all of which travel underground and feature the tagline 'Discover the full story'.

39. OndAzul NGO: Sardine

With a tag line of, "Is it what you expect to find in the sea? Neither do the fishes", there's plenty you can work with. Advertising agency Quê based in Brazil went with this strong idea across three print ads.

The photography is exceptional, with the clashing colours and careful shadow work. We especially fell in love with the font used for the hard-hitting slogan - almost childlike, it evokes the innocence of nature and the danger that the sea faces.

40. Parma Dairy Products: Story

Dairy products often try to target the parent market as we all know that kids need it to grow big and strong. Sometimes, these ads can seem a little forced and often appear a bit too cutesy for our liking but this effort from El Taier/Tribu DD is brilliant.

Using two instantly recognisible stories for both parent and child, this advert will appeal to both. The simple illustration makes it clear and consise without being too busy. The campaign features cameras and games consoles but it's this sweet story approach that really caught our eye.

41. Baruel Foot Deodrant: Puppet dumped

At first glance, we didn't quite get this ad. But a little look closer and we can see the attention to detail and brilliant art direction that's been gaining this ad a lot of love. As it's for a foot deodorant, the puppets are actually being controlled by feet instead of hands; a humourus touch to a not-so-sexy brand.

Created by advertising agency Z+ Comunicação in São Paulo, Brazil, the whole series features a number of dumping situations including bosses and landlords. We fell in love with the puppets themselves - click on the image to see the incredible detail.

42. Wrigley's Orbit: Chicken

Wrigley's have a history of doing some great print advertising work and this campaign is no exception. The colouring and illustration are what initially caught our eye but the silly slogan it ties in with works perfectly. "Don't let lunch see breakfast", just look at the poor chicken's face!

The illustration was crafted by Gabi Kikozashvili, with advertising agency Gitam BBDO leading the campaign. The other ad features a cow mourning its milk but we like the chicken best!

43. MasterCard Canada: Women's Golf

Tackling women's sport in advertising can be tricky. If you over-feminise, it can mean the wrath of many but if you don't experiement enough, it could mean a lousy campaign. Thankfully, Mastercard have mastered the subject matter with this clever and cute ad for the Women's golf tournament.

Applying their well known 'priceless' slogan, this campaign was created by Canadian advertising agency MacLaren McCann. The photo editing and treatment of the colours are what makes this one.

44. B&B Hotels: Bacon

This smart ad from creative German agency Publicis is a work of art. Bed and breakfast adverts can often be dull and regurgitated in their concepts but this campaign is a feast for the eyes.

Engaging the reader with quirky manipulation, it takes a while for the art direction to really sink in but once it does, we instantly fell in love. The rest of the series features a cheese sandwich as well as sausages on toast but we picked this purely for the egg yolk pillow!

45. National Geographic Kids Magazine

National Geographic are arguably the most well-respected nature experts but kids these days may not take notice of them thanks to the ever-expanding array of distractions in games consoles and social networking sites.

Cape Town's advertising agency FoxP2 took matters in their own hands and decided to combine the two - nature and technology. The instantly recognisible blue bird, crafted in 3D software juxtaposed next to the beautiful real life bird makes nature stand out for all the right reasons. Instantly eye-catching!

46. Pilot: Water Restraint

With a tagline of 'Pilot. Water Resistant,' the possibilities were endless. However, advertising agency GREY from Barcelona decided to take the simple approach; and it certainly paid off with this bright and nostalgic print advertising campaign. The colours are what instantly draw you in, with the undertones of blue miming those of the pen.

The text within this ad can either be nostalgic for the reader or hugely identifiable for parents, which ensures that it speaks to a wide range of consumers. A perfect balance of purpose and execution.

47. ThaiHealth Promotion Foundation: Bike

We've all seen the television campaigns and disturbing print advertisements for driving awareness. It seems to always feature an image of a recently deceased pedestrian or a horrific crash. But instead of using these traditional tactics, advertising agency BBDO in Bangkok came up with this hugely creative idea.

The 'Don't Drive Sleepy Project' is one that adheres to all drivers and the simple illustrations ensure the seriousness of this print advertising campaign hits home. The tag line 'sleepiness is stronger than you' couldn't be executed more perfectly.

48. Bosch

Hats off to the effects team behind this brilliant piece of print advertising for Bosch. The wood effect is striking for all the right reasons whilst still being able to ensure it doesn't look overdone and ridiculous. The tagline for the campaign, 'unexpectedly powerful', is expertly showcased; the power of the drill has actually spiralled the wall.

Now, we know most consumers wouldn't like this to actually happen to their wall but the point is put across. The colour blending is also hugely impressive. This print advert is instantly eye-catching, which after-all, is pretty important in this business!

49. Kitchen Aid Blender

This quaint ad didn't need any frills to get its message across. It's for Kitchen Aid, a high-tech blender which is used for smoothies and such. Of course, bananas and strawberries will get throw into the mix and this campaign simple executes the finished product: a strawana? a banaberry?

Anyway, we love the use of colour; the attention to detail; and the expert shadow effects. The small details are what could make or break a print advertising campaign, and we think it's a winner.

50. Band Aid: Hulk

The recent release of Avengers Assemble saw Hulk thrust into the spotlight once more. We're certainly not complaining (he's awesome!) and it certainly calls for endless creative executions. This print advertising campaign from Band Aid showcases the ability of using a well-known character to the maximum effect.

There's no text or tag-line; just the clean image of Hulk's hand, along with the product in the bottom left-hand corner. It perfectly executes the product's strength thanks to applying it to the world's strongest character. No words needed!

Next page: 25 more brilliant examples of print ads

51. Perrier

This campaign for Perrier water made quite a stir on the ad circuit and rightly so, as the art direction is quite simply stunning. You can almost feel the heat from the page, with the bottle of water looking more desirable than ever. There are some really nice touches here; such as the melting records in the background, the drooping disco ball and the second placement of the product on the waiter's tray.

The UK's leading integrated advertising and marketing communications agency Ogilvy were the brains behind this piece of print advertising, with photographer JeanYves Lemoigne taking the reigns for the imagery.

52. Hubba Bubba

Another great example of print advertising from the folks over at DDB, this time for bubblegum Hubba Bubba. The use of colour is what sparked us to feature it: just look at its depth! The focus on the lips is nicely executed, as they still look realistic (albeit a little freaky too.)

This print ad focuses on the length of the bubblegum (180cm) although the campaign may not really interest children. It seems to be trying to gain an older audience, still in-keeping with their playfulness. For us, it works well.

53. Utopolis Group of Cinemas: Titanic

This made us choke with laughter as soon as we saw it. It may not be the most beautiful or artistic campaign we've ever seen but it sure does grab your attention, for all the right reasons. Belgian advertising agency Duval Guillaume were behind this quirky take on our cinematic fantasies, which we all know, sadly, never really live up to our expectations.

The series also features a spin on Free Willy that's just as amusing. In this particular ad, inspired by Titanic, we love the small details of the cloudy weather and the less-than-spectacular boat. Reality sucks and that's something everyone can relate to.

54. Lego

After our recent Lego art feature, we couldn't help but include a print advertising gem for our favourite toy. Our infatuation with Lego starts at a very young age and it's our imaginations that really bring it to life. This campaign brings out the child in us all; showcasing what we actually see when we play with those coloured blocks.

There is no text included within this ad, a decision which we at Creative Bloq woukd completely agree with. There are no words needed to portray the love of the product. This is a case where simple imagery speaks to itself and we think it speaks volumes.

55. Monopoly

Another well-known and well-loved product, Monopoly, has had endless print advertising campaigns since it first came out in 1923. Admittedly, this ad is aimed at consumers that already know the product well and for those that do, this campaign works extremely well. Obviously playing on the parts of the game, in this case the red hotels, it opens up the reader's imagination.

It was important to ensure the same colour was used throughout the entire page so that the clothes of those in the picture could juxtapose and highlight the intensity of the red. A simple, sweet print ad.

56. Sanzer Hand Gel

If the first thing you think when you see this ad is along the lines of 'Yuck!' 'Euw!' or 'Gross!' then they're onto a winner. Sanzer is a brand of anti-bacterial hand-gel and it's certainly got its product's importance across with this campaign. The tag line 'What you really touch?' is portrayed perfectly with the filthy fingers and un-kept pay phone.

We love the Photoshop skills used in this great example of print advertising, down to the nitty-gritty in each of the nails. The typography is also used effectively, as the image can pretty much speak for itself. It definitely reminds us to wash our hands!

57. DeliFrance

The French are known for being a rather quaint and sophisticated bunch, which adheres perfectly to this campaign from DeliFrance. The use of the baguette mixed with the slippers, portrays a sense of comfort, which sums up the tag line perfectly: 'Ready to bake at home.'

The shadow work within this campaign is exquisite and the tiny little cracks in the baguette really convey the rustic and comforting notion of baking at home. Also, this ad is careful not to focus on the female or male market, which ensures it speaks to any baking enthusiast.

58. Print India

When faced with the tagline 'The identity of young Chennal,' there could be a gush of endless creative ideas. What does 'identity' even mean anyway? We think that this print advertising campaign from Times India sums it up in the most simplistic of ways possible: the fingerprint.

Although simple, it sincerely executes what the product is and what they're about. The fingerprint made up of newspapers is showcasing that metaphorically, their newspaper makes up the identity of the young generation.

This ad speaks volumes to the consumer, as it is connecting something so personal (their identity) to their product. Very clever!

59. Nike

We could feature almost all of Nike's print advertising campaigns, as over the years they have come up with some of the most innovative and ground-breaking ads we've ever seen. Obviously, we could only feature one and this Nike Liquid campaign really stuck with us.

The effects used to create this stunning visual are clearly where the success lies. Just look at the reflection of light in the pink liquid, or the droplets placed to perfection to ensure the image looks as realistic as possible. This print advert is aimed to showcase the versatilely and dynamic aspect of the sneaker. Nike has got itself another winner.

60. WeightWatchers

When you think of influential print advertising campaigns, WeightWatchers doesn't really spring to mind. However, after scouring through hundreds of print ads, this is one that really stood out from the bunch. The perfectly made-up lips clashed with the greasy batch of fries makes for quite a stomach-churning effect.

Without the excess number of fries, this would probably be semi-enticing but the simple addition really gets the message across. It isn't telling you to stop this or stop that; it's telling you to 'treat yourself better.' A simple and very personal print ad that works.

61. India's Nilkamal Plastic Chairs

At Creative Bloq, we don't think there's enough illustrated print advertising campaigns out there. That's why we were delighted to stumble across this gem from Nilkamal plastic chairs. Yes, the elephant standing on one of the products obviously shows off its stability but the illustration makes it much more.

The beautiful colours and drawings were brought to you by brand communications agency Makani. The attention to detail is really what brings this piece together: just look at the fear in the elephant's eye (who, might we point out, is also staring straight at the product.)

62. Faber-Castell

This awesome print advertising campaign from Faber-Castell not only features this little dog; it also uses the likes of a shark and an aubergine. It's somewhat freakish nature entices the reader enough to want to know what the product is, whilst still oozing a sophisticated approach.

The lighting in this advert really makes it, as well as the reflections from the dogs fur and the colouring pencil itself. The typography is a traditional one, which to the reader can showcase a trusted brand.

63. Feltrinelli Reading

Another illustrated print advertisement, this one's for Feltrinelli books and showcases their passion for reading. It's often hard to advertise books these days, thanks to the likes of the Kindle but this sweet illustration goes back to the roots of why reading is great.

The juxtaposed colours of the typography with the hands and the book sums up the tag line perfectly: 'Reading means resisting.' Together, you and the book are shutting out the sounds of the world and to most of us, that sounds like a pretty nice idea.

64. M&Ms

Ah, M&Ms. Probably more well-known for their television campaigns, it was this simple print ad that really caught our eye. Most people nowadays instantly recognise the layout of a keyboard and this campaign is a sweet and playful way to showcase a well-known product.

It's not just for M&Ms in general: this print advertising campaign was to raise awareness of consumers being able to customise their very own M&Ms. The tag line of 'communication just got sweeter' perfectly mirrors the sweetness of the campaign itself.

65. Mebucaine

You know when you have one of those really sore throats? When it feels like your swallowing glass with every gulp? We've all been there and this campaign from Mebucaine, a sore throat medicine, really brings that feeling to life. The print advertisement campaign features also features a pizza made of glass (ouch!)

The colours of the glass and the structure of the pineapple is stunning with the product placement easily placed. We don't even think the tag line was needed but we still love it!

66. Yum Yum Peanut Butter

Dramatising Yum Yum Peanut Butter as the smoothest peanut butter in South Africa, this print advertising campaign was led by Cape Town based design agency 34 Degrees. Creative director Richard Phillips took haul of the whole campaign and we love it. Am I Collective were in charge of the illustration side of things; we love their brash and bold approach juxtaposing the teeny, tiny peanut.

The whole campaign is an absolute winner. The 3D work on this particular character is just perfect; take a look at that shadowing!

67. Poly-Brite

We have to admit, it took us a little while to get this print advertising campaign but as soon as we did, we loved it! Poly-Brite wants to be known for its 'super-absorbant' cloths and this clever imagery showcases that important branding.

Ogilvy & Mather was the agency behind the campaign, which includes a vase and a spilt cup of tea. All three print advertisements complement each other perfectly. Its important within this sector to get the balance right between the purpose of the product and the way it is creatively showcased, and this campaign is a perfect example.

68. Church End Brewery

Everyone's gone Olympics mad in Britain and many businesses and companies have jumped on the sporting bandwagon to attract new customers. Being bombarded with Union Jacks can soon become creative overkill, but this print advertisement from agency Rees Bradley Hepburn hits the nail right on the head.

The whole campaign manages to capture the essense of Britain's culture in one swift photograph, whilst encorporating the sporting aspect without being too obvious. The image also complements the tag line 'Sporting Gold: A winning blend of British hops.'

69. McDonald's

McDonald's has had some brilliant campaigns over the years but it was this collection that really put the smile on our faces. The series features three 'kids' (in this case, little monsters) that every parent has had some sort of experience with. This print ad is successful as it immediately relates to the parent with a light-hearted approach.

We couldn't help but fall in love with character design involved. DDB was the impressive team behind the entire campaign, with Carioca in charge of the illustration and photography. A perfect combination!

70. Seitenbacher Musli Cereal

This ad had us gawping at our screens: just look at that 3D illustration! There's so much attention to detail in this piece, which is something that a lot of print adverts can forget about. The dogs; her hair; the smoke... they're all exquisitly done.

The series sees a collection of various characters but it was this colour scheme that really caught our eye. The deep blue really makes the illustration by Monty Aji Hardito jump out from the page. A job well done by advertising agency JWT Jakarta.

71. Play-Doh

Every kid loves Play-Doh... heck, everyone loves Play-Doh. This simple print ad works wonders on playing on the imagination; with its old-school style and bold product placement. The sticker effect is one that's been played around with many times over the years in a number of ads and this example proves it still works wonders.

Advertising agency DDB is once again behind this creative campaign. The strong colour scheme and simple approach make it an absolute winner.

72. BIC

BIC is a well-known brand that's had some new life thrust into it thanks to advertising agency BorghiErh/Lowe. This adorable campaign, which showcases the product's ability and strength, really grabs the reader's eye.

The 3D work here is great, with the campaign also including a broken button. The only qualm we have is that the lighting is a little dark and could do with brightening up a little.

73. OMO Washing Detergent

This print advertising campaign is for OMO washing detergent, so what better way to showcase its cleaning capabilites than dirt? The entire series, which includes a space scene and dinousaur digging, is made completely from dirt. We found this one most impressive due to the 3D aspects of the tree and the intricate details (including the apple falling from it).

This is absolute stunning work and it's all down to the fantastic art direction of Karen Vermeulen at advertising agency Lowe. A truly innovative approach to advertising washing powder!

74. Anador

We absolutely love this quirky illustration from Bruna Guerreiro and Robison Mattei.

Most painkiller advertisements feature a disgruntled looking figure who longs for the tablet. So it's great to see this approach from design agency BorghiErh/Lowe.

This series features a number of situations in various shades of pastels that complement each other very well indeed. If we saw this advert whilst flicking through our favourite magazine, we'd definitely be giving it a second look.

75. Abbott, Ensure Active M2

Now this is a print ad you really have to look at. The hilarious series, which features a footballer and a tourist, had us laughing in seconds. We also loved the distinctive character design: you're not going to see creations like that everyday!

The simple colour scheme allows the concept to shine whilst the subtle product placement in the bottom left-hand corner is a nice touch to keep things understated. The fantastic team at JWT were once again on hand to give their creative touch to a stunning print advertising campaign.

Next page: 25 more brilliant examples of print ads

76. McDonald's

Illustrator Helen Musselwhite worked with legendary advertising agency Leo Burnett to create this awe-inspiring paper illustration. The design is based around McDonald's upcoming collaboration with DK Books in conjunction with their Happy Meals.

77. Bioenergy Nutrition

Italian heath supplements company Bioenergy Nutrition wanted to promote the benefits of low levels of cholesterol and triglyceri. Milanese advertising agency Alch1m1a ADV created this macabre series of print ads casting butter as the baddie in an instantly recognisable way - sculpting three well known horror icons out of the fatty spread.

78. Royal Legion

Following the First World War, the poppy became a symbol of the war dead in Britain and Commonwealth countries - because the bright red flower was one of the only plants to grow on some of the worst battlefields. The Royal British Legion adopted it in 1921 to help it raise funds for war veterans, and the tradition of wearing one on the 11th November (the anniversary of the end of the war) began.

The buying and wearing of poppies remains central to British life and culture, but last year, The Legion felt the campaign needed an extra push. So it created this 2012 Poppy Appeal advertising campaign.

To reinforce the message that everyone in UK society should be wearing a poppy, each ad featured a cut-out poppy revealing several different backdrops from around the capital. The campaign was the work of Simone Micheli (art director) and Rob DeCleyn (copywriter) of The Gate (see their other work here) while the CGI work came courtesy of Taylor James.

79. Brucciani: Wi-Fi

The message behind this print ad might not be immediately obvious, but as soon as we got it we just had to share it with you. The subtle shading and use of colour is what makes this ad pop - just look at the Wi-Fi signal in the coffee cup!

It was created by UK advertising agency Big Communications, with executive creative director Dylan Bogg and creative director Billy Mawhinney. Art direction was taken care of by Ed Bentinck and designers Duncan Bancroft and Simon Dilks.

80. Master Trap: Casino

This clever little ad has been getting a lot of love and we can see why. It's simple, effective, and funny and those are three things that make print advertising work. With the tag line, "fatal attraction", it works perfectly with the casino and Master Trap affiliation.

Advertising Agency Ogilvy & Mather, based in Bangkok, Thailand took care of the campaign and we think they've done a great job. Creative directors Wisit Lumsiricharoenchoke and Nopadol Srikieatikajohn have already collaborated on a number of successful ads and we think this one for Master Trap is certainly one of their best.

81. Jeep - Earth Day

The team at ad agency Draftfcb ask a good question...

To conincide with Earth Day this week, ad agency Draftfcb in Tel-Aviv, Israel created this simple but effective poster design for Jeep. Using a symbolic green background, simple graphics display a Jeep falling off the side of the Earth, with the poignant tagline 'If there is no planet, where will you drive?' underneath. Good question.

82. Champion Dog

The Champion Dog campaign encouraged people to adopt a dog in need at Christmas

This adorable campaign by Lowe Porta for Champion Dogs really pulls at the heart strings. Wanting to encourage people to adopt (rather than buy) a dog at Christmas, the Chilean-based ad agency developed a series of touching scenes featuring super-cute, present-shaped puppies.

84. Aizone

Sagmeister & Walsh have been creating campaigns for Beirut luxury department store Aizone since 2010, with a focus on only black and white executions. This time, they decided to mix things up and add a splash of colour.

Whilst Sagmeister & Walsh took care of the art direction, Henry Hargreaves worked as the photographer on the project. If you'd like to see more imagery from the campaign, you can visit the Sagmeister & Walsh official site.

85. Quebec Automobile Insurance Society

Driving safety is a daunting task for any creative agency - it has to provoke a strong and lasting impression with an important message whilst still being creatively sound. This campaign from Lg2, an agency based in Canada does all these things and more.

Although a somewhat vintage idea, the seatbelt is used to showcase the important message and incourage young drivers to ensure their own safety. Creative direction and copywriting was overseen by Luc Du Sault and the campaign features a further two ads.

86. The Guardian US

This clever campaign shows both sides of each argument

Using illustrations by Noma Bar, these print ads for the American launch of British newspaper The Guardian depict both sides of core political debates in the US, such as internet privacy, gun control, women in the military and the use of condoms in the adult film industry.

Appearing at key locations throughout the country as outdoor ads and mobile billboards, each illustration represents one opinion of the issue. When the poster is flipped, it effortlessly illustrates the opposite view.

87. Exito

Don't let your water to taste like the contents of your fridge

There's nothing quite like a glass of fresh, ice-cold water straight from the fridge. Aware of this, Latin American supermarket Exito recently developed a special bottle with seven layers, designed to preserve the taste of the H2O inside.

In a print campaign to promote the new product, advertising agency Sancho BBDO developed this clever series of ads, featuring some of the more pungent things one might keep in the fridge, including salmon and green onions, being poured into glass containers.

88. Academia do rock classics

Rock classes now for kids in this adorable print campaign

These adorable print ads created by Brazilian based agency Yeah! aim to portray "rock classes now also for kids." Featuring The Beatles as well as a host of other bands, this simple print ad approach is colourfully eye-catching as well as appealing to kids and grown-ups alike. We especially love the Ozzy Osbourne tribute.

89. Sharpie

We love the comic book execution of this print ad

Pen giant Sharpie has produced some marvellous print ads over the years and kept up with design trends galore. Brazilian based agency Draftfcb creates these clever print ads with the tagline 'One story. Two Points'. In the ad above, the Sharpie is depicting the two sides of the sucess of Facebook. We love the comic book execution. Which side will you believe?

90. CSI

Using evidence as a maze, this print ad promotes the popular TV show CSI

Fans of the hugely successful TV show CSI will love these print ads promoting it. With the slogan 'let the clues show you the way', this design by Publicis uses evidencial marks as mazes to a corpse, brilliantly summing up the investigative show's appeal.

91. The Potting Shed

Print ads don't have to be technically sophisticated - this brilliant campaign uses just two lengths of thread and some pins

Adverts for wealth management companies often show dull stock images of businessmen standing about. But these print ads for Jersey-based firm Affinity Wealth Management are a world apart.

Created by design agency The Potting Shed, each of these beautiful and elegant images was designed by the group and then created by junior designer Sam Falla using just two lengths of thread and some pins. The beauty of the concept lies in its simplicity particularly in its choice of two colours and a set of simple images.

92. FedEx: USA - Brazil

FedEx have had plenty of campaigns in the past but this simple execution of its services really does the job. The use of colour used for the U.S.A. and Brazil against the wall colour ensure this print advert looks realistic yet artistic. The campaign also ensures that the FedEx package is the centre of attention without being too bolshy.

This series also features China - Australia and London - Spain but the contrasting colours of the countries with the walls seem to let them down; unlike this highly original example of print advertising. The 'express' is also boldly executed thanks to the quick passing of the package.

93. Zoo Safari

This print advertising truly lives up to its tagline: 'Blend In.' The photography, along with Photoshop expertise and the gorgeous colours, make the campaign cute yet sophisticated. DDB is known for its innovative take on products and campaigns such as this Chuppa Chups advertisment and its breast cancer awareness series.

The Zoo Safari series also features a tiger and a gorilla (which are both equally humorous) collating the three print ads as one of the most creative campaigns we've had the pleasure of placing our eyes upon.

94. Electro Recycling Robot

Look! A robot poos electronic stuff! Ha ha! But really, this print advertising campaign from Euro RSCG is a tongue-in-cheek execution of quite a serious issue (electronic recycling). You may be wondering how an excreting robot is relevant but it all becomes clear with the tag line, 'potty train your e-waste'.

The artistic direction is simple yet effective. The font at the bottom of this print ad is also big enough to entice the reader's attention and ensure the message has firmly been executed.

95. Pizza & Love: Fight for the Amazonas

Most companies have been jumping on the green bandwagon for some time now (and so they should!). But one that is probably least likely to do so is a pizza restaurant/take-away. This campaign was designed to raise awareness of its eco-friendly packaging (100 per cent recycled pizza boxes) and its use of only organic products.

The execution is brilliantly done, from the broccoli forest to the greasy planet in the background. Also notice the peace logo in the bottom left hand corner: it's another pizza! Little touches such as these is what makes print advertising so innovative.

96. Beck's: Art in Progress

Vault49 bring their illustrative skills to the table once again

British born, New York-based design studio Vault49 brought its inimitable style to this illustration-led campaign for Beck's beer. Reflecting a growing trend for production-line-style visuals that reflect the creation process - also noticeable in Nike's Reuse-a-Shoe campaign - the ad explores the different elements that go into a bottle of Beck's, from an imaginative, conceptual viewpoint rather than a literal representation of the production process.

97. Pantone: Rain Edition

Rainwater is given a splash of colour in this print ad

A collaborative effort between Italian creatives Giuliano Lo Re and Matteo Gallinelli, this inspiring campaign for Pantone puts colour front and centre, as you'd expect for the kings of the special ink. But rather than play the well-worn rainbow card, the duo opted to explore the relationship between colour and water - particularly rainwater.

98. Marmite: Don't Forget It

You won't forget Marmite in a hurry with this series of print ads

Adam&EveDDB have gone one step further with the 'Love it or hate it' theme in this latest print and TV campaign for Marmite, satirising animal cruelty appeals by "raising awareness" of woefully neglected Marmite jars across Britain. You can watch the accompanying TV commercial here.

99. Scribe pencils

From extinct to mythical creatures, anything is possible with Scribe pencils

The illustrations in this beautifully executed campaign for Scribe pencils do all the talking. The idea being to 'Bring your ideas to reality', artist Hernan Marin created three eye-catching drawings of a dinosaur, mermaid and unicorn, which almost have a lifelike, 3D quality to them. Conceived and executed by Bogota-based ad agency Melborp, the campaign highlights the endless creative possibilities with these pencils.

100. French Ministry of Health

Ice cream, anyone?

This ad campaign for the French Ministry of Health highlights the growing the growing issue of obesity in children. An original concept, the illustration, art directed and copy written by David Lesage, features an image of an ice cream, topped with a big belly. The copy reads "L'obesite commence des le plus jeune age," meaning "obesity starts at a young age."

A selection of the datasets available within EarthCache. Photo: SkyWatch.

Although the global repository of Earth Observation (EO) imagery continues to grow, the means by which developers can turn that data into value are arguably less abundant. To address this demand, young software company SkyWatch has established a new cloud-based system called EarthCache that opens the door for developers to create new applications and products based on remote sensing data.

In an interview with Via Satellite, SkyWatch’s Chief Operating Officer (COO) Dexter Jagula explained that EarthCache targets developers looking for an easier way to access EO data, particularly those who have never leveraged remote sensing data in their respective markets. “That’s where we believe the true innovation and increase in usage will be realized,” Jagula said.

Jagula said he has observed demand ramping up for new applications for agriculture and infrastructure projects in particular. “From the agriculture standpoint, we’re talking about users that are looking to develop vegetation health indexes,” he said. “A prime use case would be allowing farmers to assess the health of their fields.”

On the infrastructure side, developers are seeking new ways to monitor the operational efficiency of projects such as new roads and railways, as well as improve emergency response analysis in rural areas, he added.

Dexter Jagula, SkyWatch COO. Photo: SkyWatch.

As SkyWatch states on its website, the current process for purchasing satellite data can be somewhat lengthy and time-consuming, as commercial satellite operators typically don’t distribute their own data and instead operate through regional and territorial resellers. This paradigm does allow satellite operators to more easily serve localized end-users such as city governments — but according to a 2014 Euroconsult report on data distribution, some end-user sectors, such as defense, prefer to bypass resellers entirely in lieu of shorter delivery times, additional autonomy in satellite tasking, and continuous data supply.

“As you can imagine it’s not a very scalable method. This is just the way the industry has offered the data for the last few decades,” Jagula added.

But there are exceptions. As Jagula pointed out, the industry has started to question the reseller model with the rise of EO juggernauts such as Planet and DigitalGlobe, which have developed their own digital infrastructure through which any of their customers can access their massive data archives. According to Jagula, SkyWatch has followed suit on this trend to recreate this type of infrastructure for the entire industry, but at a lower cost than traditional resellers.

EarthCache comprises both public and commercial data, coalescing datasets from partners such as NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The company is currently in talks with some of the prominent satellite operators to integrate their datasets too, Jagula said, as well as younger NewSpace startups looking to field new constellations.

The biggest draw for commercial companies to link their catalogs with EarthCache is additional visibility for their data. Additionally, SkyWatch offers a means for end users to task satellites on an anonymized basis. “We believe customers of this type of data don’t really care which satellites are being used,” he said. “We make this opportunity completely available and transparent to [satellite operators] so it’s on them to try and fulfill that if they have the capability or capacity on the satellite to do so.”

According to Jagula, SkyWatch plans to work closely with companies across the value chain to potentially funnel customers through the same conduit. Leaf Space, which is developing a ground station network to download more than seven terabytes of satellite data per day, is just one example of the kind of companies SkyWatch has formed a relationship with, Jagula said. Satellite operators who want their data downloaded to Leaf Space’s ground stations could then disseminate that data through SkyWatch’s platform, he explained. “And then tasking opportunities that are sent by users downstream can be sent directly … to Leaf Space’s customers as well,” he said. “You can see how a ground segment company like Leaf Space and SkyWatch go hand-in-hand.”

While companies such as DigitalGlobe and Planet will continue to distribute their data through their own proprietary platforms, Jagula doesn’t necessarily see it as a threat to the SkyWatch business. One reason is because they can still integrate their data in EarthCache if they choose, but also because he sees new companies building their own distribution platforms as “a waste of resources” if they don’t have one already. “In cases where companies are still launching, they can use us as a digital infrastructure exclusively … and save their capital for more important tasks and focus on their core competencies,” he said.

As tropical storm Harvey continues to drench Houston, turning streets into muddy rivers, NASA workers are keeping watch over a giant $8.6 billion space telescope at the edge of the city.

The James Webb Space Telescope is currently sitting inside a massive, sealed cryogenic chamber at the Johnson Space Center, a sprawling NASA facility in southeast Houston. In July, Webb began a 100-day stint in the vault-like chamber, which simulates the extreme conditions in space. Vacuum pumps remove the air inside the chamber, and liquid nitrogen and helium get pumped in to produce temperatures found in deep space.

As Harvey moved inland, an emergency-operations Twitter account for Johnson reported flooding in the area, tweeting early Sunday morning: “Getting multiple reports of flooding homes all around our area. Water on site is over the sidewalks approaching steps. Knee deep in streets.” A Sunday morning tweet said the complex had received 22 inches of rain, and an afternoon tweet reported “heavy rain hammering us again. (More than 31 inches of rain have fallen, according to the latest statement from Johnson Monday afternoon.)

The reports must have worried some Webb fans, leading NASA to publicly reassure people on Monday:

We appreciate the concern for @NASAWebb. Our personnel and hardware are safe and everyone is taking appropriate precautions. #JWST#Harvey

William Jeffs, a spokesperson for Johnson Space Center, said in an email Monday there have been “no issues with operations.” “All backup facility systems required to maintain the telescope have been checked and readied for use if necessary,” Jeffs said.

The concern is understandable. The Webb telescope, with its 21-foot-tall gold-coated mirrors, has been in the works for more than two decades. The telescope will be 100 times more powerful than its scientific predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists are relying on Webb to peer into the universe farther than ever before, showing humanity the earliest stars and galaxies. It’s scheduled to launch next year. The thought of flooding described as “catastrophic” getting anywhere near Webb rattles the nerves.

Sarah Kendrew, an astronomer and instrument scientist at the European Space Agency, traveled from Baltimore to Houston Tuesday to support Webb’s testing operations. “I thought I knew about rain (I lived in Britain for a long time!), but nothing could have prepared me for what we are seeing here at the moment,” Kendrew wrote in an email. “Every time I think we’re through the worst of the storm and it can’t possibly rain any more, another wave hits us with relentless rain, and often violent thunder and lightning.”

Kendrew said staffers were feeling anxious, and many slept in offices or conference rooms at Johnson when they couldn’t get home or to hotel rooms. “It’s been challenging at times to concentrate on work whilst our phones are sounding emergency flood and tornado alerts several times an hour, and knowing that people just miles from our desks, maybe even family or friends, are in danger and possibly losing their homes,” she said. But “we’ve actually been able to continue amazingly well with the testing,” she said.

NASA has shut down Johnson Space Center for all employees except essential personnel, like members of the center’s flight-control room, which communicates with the International Space Station. Royce Renfrew, an ISS flight director at Johnson, drove into Johnson Sunday night, slept in the office, and began his work supporting the space station Monday morning. Renfrew said in an email that others who live nearby took advantage of breaks in rainfall to commute.

“This event will become yet another item of lore in the long history of flight operations for young flight controllers to learn from,” Renfrew said.

On 25 August 2017, the Italian ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli, currently residing on the International Space Station (ISS), remote-controlled the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Rollin’ Justin robot. During the experiment, a tablet-PC was used to send instructions to the robot at the DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics in Oberpfaffenhofen from the ISS. Justin was then left to his own devices in the completion of various tasks and was required to use artificial intelligence to decide how individual work stages needed to be completed. These tasks belong to the SUPVIS Justin experiment, which is being carried out as part of the METERON project (Multi-Purpose End-to-End Robotic Operation Network) in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA). Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство, Немецкий аэрокосмический центр

On 25 August 2017, the Italian ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli, currently residing on the International Space Station (ISS), remote-controlled the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Rollin’ Justin robot. During the experiment, a tablet-PC was used to send instructions to the robot at the DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics in Oberpfaffenhofen from the ISS. Justin was then left to his own devices in the completion of various tasks and was required to use artificial intelligence to decide how individual work stages needed to be completed. These tasks belong to the SUPVIS Justin experiment, which is being carried out as part of the METERON project (Multi-Purpose End-to-End Robotic Operation Network) in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA). Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство, Немецкий аэрокосмический центр

On 25 August 2017, the Italian ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli, currently residing on the International Space Station (ISS), remote-controlled the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Rollin’ Justin robot. During the experiment, a tablet-PC was used to send instructions to the robot at the DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics in Oberpfaffenhofen from the ISS. Justin was then left to his own devices in the completion of various tasks and was required to use artificial intelligence to decide how individual work stages needed to be completed. These tasks belong to the SUPVIS Justin experiment, which is being carried out as part of the METERON project (Multi-Purpose End-to-End Robotic Operation Network) in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA). Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство, Немецкий аэрокосмический центр

WASHINGTON — Finnish company Iceye announced Aug. 23 that it has raised $13 million to further development of a constellation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) cubesats.

Iceye said in a statement that $8.5 million of the new funding came in a financing round led by Draper Nexus, an early-stage venture capital company with offices in California and Japan. Others participating in the round include True Ventures, Lifeline Ventures, Space Angels and Draper Associates.

The other $4.5 million came from the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovations, known as Tekes, company spokesperson Aubrey Lerche said in an Aug. 24 email. Tekes funds research and development work by companies and organizations in Finland. The company has raised $18.7 million to date, including funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program.

As part of the financing round, Q Motiwala, managing director of Draper Nexus, will join Iceye’s board of directors. “Iceye has a disruptive value proposition of making Earth observation data and insights available at a refresh rate and cost that is orders of magnitude better than any system out there today,” he said in a statement.

Iceye is developing cubesat-class spacecraft capable of producing SAR imagery. The company said in its statement announcing the funding that it plans to launch three such spacecraft with SAR payloads in the next year. Last August, it announced an agreement with York Space Systems, a Denver-based smallsat developer, for 10 spacecraft platforms.

However, Iceye is taking a different approach for the initial three satellites. Lerche said one satellite will be built entirely in-house by Iceye. A second satellite will be designed by Iceye but assembled and tested by an unnamed partner, while the third satellite will be partially designed and assembled by that partner, using Iceye’s SAR sensor. That approach, Iceye said, is designed to test each approach for spacecraft development before moving into full-scale production.

Iceye plans to later launch a constellation of 18 satellites in order to provide revisit times of several hours. The company did not disclose when it expected to have that constellation in place, or how much additional capital it would need to raise to deploy that system.

“Iceye will use this capital infusion to continue growing operations, readying our technology for the next generation of SAR microsatellite constellations,” Rafal Modrzewski, co-founder and chief executive of Iceye, said in a statement.

Iceye hopes to attract customer interest from several markets for SAR imagery, ranging from urban planning and tracking port activity to environmental and agricultural applications. The company said it hopes to sign up “large commitments” from customers around the time it launches its initial satellites.

Iceye is one of several companies proposing constellations of small satellites to provide SAR imagery more frequently and at lower costs than existing, larger SAR satellites. Another startup, California-based Capella Space, raised a $12 million Series A round in May to support its own constellation of SAR smallsats.

An Iceye rendering of the first SAR microsatellite deployed in orbit. Photo: Iceye.

Iceye has announced $13 million in new funding, including an $8.5 million financing round led by Draper Nexus. Iceye will use the latest funding to scale up operations, including manufacturing of its Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technology built from off-the-shelf components, and to launch additional satellites. The company plans to launch the first three microsatellites equipped with SAR sensors over the next 12 months, delivering Earth Observation (EO) data to select customers shortly thereafter.

This $8.5 million round also included participation from True Ventures, Lifeline Ventures, Space Angels, and Draper Associates. Tekes, the Finnish funding agency for technology and innovations, also provided additional capital. Since starting its operations in 2015, Iceye has secured a total of $18.7 million in financing, including investments from the European Union’s (EU) Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program.

With darkness or clouds covering two-thirds of the planet at any given time, SAR technology delivers imaging where optical imaging cannot. Finland-based Iceye has developed a SAR sensor to offer global imaging services with response times measured in a few hours from acquisition. By enabling economically viable microsatellite constellations, Iceye’s goal is to expand access to SAR data at a lower cost and with better time efficiency to commercial and government entities.

The total solar eclipse Monday was the first time one has occurred and was visible from the U.S. in more than 30 years. Relive the experience below with some of the best pictures captured by NASA.

1) An image captured by NASA of the moon transiting across the sun.

Photo: NASA.

2) A silhouette of the International Space Station with a crew of six on board as it transits across the sun at approximately five miles per second. NASA captured this image from Ross Lake, Northern Cascades National Park, Washington. On board as part of Expedition 52 include NASA astronauts Peggy Whitson, Jack Fischer, and Randy Bresnik; Russian cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Sergey Ryazanskiy; and European Space Agency astronaut Paolo Nespoli.

Photo: NASA.

3) This full-disk geocolor image from GOES-16 shows the shadow of the moon covering a large portion of the northwestern U.S.

Photo: NASA.

4) The moon is seen passing in front of the sun at the point of the maximum of the partial solar eclipse near Banner, Wyoming.

On Monday, Ars writers shared some thoughts about the total solar eclipse that spanned the United States with readers and took some backyard photographs of the event. But let's be honest, none of us are professional photographers, and didn't possess the right equipment to do the celestial event justice.

Fortunately, there's a space agency for that. Two, even. And on Monday NASA and the European Space Agency deployed their resources on the ground and in space to capture the eclipse, doing so in stunning fashion. This gallery highlights everything from the International Space Station transiting the Sun during the eclipse, to astronauts on board the station itself taking pictures of the event back on Earth.

Paris (ESA) Aug 22, 2017
The European Space Agency (ESA) invites members of the science community in Europe to propose ideas for research that could be performed on the Deep Space Gateway, a crewed spaceship in lunar vicinity.
The Deep Space Gateway is a strategic platform that is being prepared by the International Space Station partner agencies to be humanity's next step beyond Low-Earth Orbit and out into the S Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство

Vancouver, BC-based UrtheCast Corp. has announced the signing of a contract “in excess of one hundred million Canadian dollars” with an undisclosed customer to build a single synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite which will act as a precursor to its currently planned sixteen satellite constellation of eight optical and eight dual-band X- and L-band Earth observation satellites.

From top left, a sample X-band SAR image with a sample L-band SAR image on the top right. From bottom left, a sample multi-spectral optical image with a sample fused image, combining the highlights of the first three images on the bottom right, and suggesting new patterns. While the Urthecast OptiSar Constellation is expected to serve as a platform for advancing the development of a host of new applications and services, its not the only player in this niche. Major competitors include Richmond BC based MacDonald Dettwiler (currently building the RADARSAT Constellation series of three SAR satellites for the Canadian government) along it's subsidiary, Colorado based DigitalGlobe (a commercial Earth imaging provider which owns the four satellite Worldview Constellation and has strong ties to the US military), plus Paris, France based Astrium (a division of Airbus Group) and San Francisco based Planet (which controls over a hundred small orbiting Earth imaging cubesat's now and plans to launch more). Images c/o UrtheCast.

But the new contract will also delay the roll-out of its integrated, multi-spectral optical and radar (OptiSAR) constellation by "at least a year," to around 2023. As outlined on the undated European Space Agency (ESA) EO Portal Directory webpage under the title, "the OptiSAR (Optical and SAR) Commercial Constellation of UrtheCast," the constellation was initially expected to be deployed over multiple launches in 2019 and 2020.

UrtheCast President and CEO Wade Larson stated during the August 14th, 2017 Urthecast Q2 2017 investor conference call that the company purchasing the SAR satellite was one of three that had already signed a memorandum of understanding to be clients of the OptiSAR constellation once it becomes operational.

Building and delivering this accelerator SAR satellite will validate our technology, substantially reduce our financial, programmatic and operational risks, and get us into the business of selling SAR-XL data sooner than we were anticipating.

Subject to final approvals, we’ll soon be customer-funded to build our first operational-class SAR mission.

This precursor mission will enable Urthecast to both demonstrate its OptiSAR technology to prospective clients as well as enable an additional revenue stream for the company prior to the constellation’s launch in 2023.

The company also plans to launch an eight-satellite constellation in 2020, called UrtheDaily, designed to capture daily, medium-quality optical imagery of the Earth's entire landmass (excluding Antarctica).

This is the third substantial announcement UrtheCast has made regarding the OptiSar constellation over the last year.

UrtheCast currently operates various Earth observation systems, including two satellites, Deimos-1 and Deimos-2, to produce imagery that is displayed on UrtheCast's cloud-based web platform and sold to various partners and customers.

Through its subsidiary Deimos Imaging, UrtheCast processes and distributes imagery and value-added products on behalf of the PanGeo Alliance, a global network of eight satellite operators with a combined fleet of 15 Earth Observation systems.

OptiSAR is intended to be the world’s first multispectral combined optical/SAR constellation of Earth Observation satellites. The constellation will consist of 16 spacecraft; 8 pairs of SAR and optical satellites working in tandem. Closely pairing both types of satellite will enable near-simultaneous acquisition of both radar and optical imagery. Each satellite pair will be capable of providing very high quality imagery at 1m resolution in X-band and 5m resolution in L-band as well as colour video at 30 fps.

The OptiSAR system will combine the best of both worlds; optical imagery taken during best weather conditions augmented by SAR’s greater detail, day-or-night flexibility and cloud-penetrating abilities. This fusion will result in far richer data-sets (the SAR data acting as metadata for the optical) that will enable more powerful analysis in fields as diverse as agricultural monitoring, disaster relief and urban planning.

The contract covers delivery of the spacecraft (to be built by UK based Surrey Satellite Technology), key elements of the ground segment and post-launch maintenance and operational support. Urthecast and its client will enter into a separate contract to provide UrtheCast with the exclusive distribution rights to the client’s unused imaging capacity on a shared 50/50 net revenue basis outside the client’s own region.

Subject to government approvals, work on the satellite is anticipated to begin in early 2018 with a launch in late 2020.

Inovor CEO Matthew Tetlow with the company’s first CubeSat. Photo: Inovor/The Lead South Australia.

Australian nanosatellite startup Inovor Technologies has proposed a new potential solution to monitor orbital debris: using optical sensors from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to track space junk further out in Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO). According to Inovor’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Matthew Tetlow, who spoke with Via Satellite by email, optical systems are in fact the only feasible solution to provide Space Situational Awareness (SSA) in GEO because ground-based radar systems don’t have the range to observe that far out in space.

“Ground-based systems can be very large and able to detect very faint objects but they are restricted to operating at night and when the weather is clear. Space-based systems don’t have the weather/environment problem but they’re expensive to deploy, especially with large optics. As such, there are not many out there,” Tetlow said.

The Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC), located at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, uses a mixture of technologies including the Space-Based Surveillance System (SBSS) to track objects in orbit. Still, the organization and others conducting similar work rely largely on ground-based radar and optical systems spread across the globe. As a result of these limited sensors, JSpOC is only able to consistently track objects between 1cm and 10cm — approximately the size of a softball — despite the fact that an object as small as a marble is potentially enough to destroy a spacecraft. According to Tetlow, Inovor will contribute an additional layer of support, as it can track most objects of interest “but more importantly, offer a new capability of near-persistent tracking of any particular object,” he said.

However, as Tetlow admits, using small optics in LEO to find even smaller objects in GEO is not an easy task. “The further away you are from an object, the larger the optic required to capture the object and distinguish it from a nearby object. In addition to this you need the image resolution to be high enough to have each pixel represent a small enough area out where the object is that you can resolve its position,” he said.

To bolster the accuracy of its system, Inovor will incorporate statistical analysis to estimate a particular object’s location once it’s detected. The benefit of having multiple nanosatellites in the constellation is that they can take more than one observation of the same object to more precisely hone in on its location. “Being able to resolve an object is different from being able to detect it. With long integration times and novel image processing techniques we expect to be able to detect fairly faint objects out at GEO, but won’t know exactly where it is inside the pixel view, hence the use of the statistical methods based on multiple observations,” Tetlow said.

According to Tetlow, Inovor will buy its sensors from a partner organization, most likely an Australian defense prime contractor. The optic will be a Cassegrain reflector, he said, similar to optical telescopes, and will be able to achieve a resolution better than 2m in the visible bands.

Inovor tested its first nanosatellite on-orbit in April along with 50 other CubeSats launched as part of the European-funded QB50 project. One of the biggest takeaways from the company’s first launch, Tetlow said, was that Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) components aren’t as low-risk as they are perceived to be. “These are complex subsystems that are essentially ‘black boxes’ as the customer has very little information about how the system actually works and, as such, it is very difficult to troubleshoot when you are working with multiple COTS parts. I think this is why vendors are moving to supply whole buses instead of components and subsystems,” he explained.

Inovor continues to tweak the design of its optical nanosatellites, and will display the technology this September at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide.

Like his peers, Tetlow noted that he too fully supports the creation of a national space body, especially given the rapidly growing space startup community in South Australia. “I hope it will bring focus to the growing space industry by providing a clear point of contact for international space agencies to connect with to build collaborative international space projects. We have some niche capabilities in Australia, but no one in government is out there supporting its development or selling it to international space players,” he said. “I also hope the agency comes with some funding to kick off the growing space industry.”

Washington (UPI) Aug 14, 2017
A new heat map published by the European Space Agency offers a colorful, bird's-eye-view of last week's heatwave in Southern Europe.
As showcased by the swath of organs and red hues blanketing much of the Mediterranean, much of Southern Europe experienced highs near 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
During the string of extreme highs, ESA's Earth-observing and weather satellites helped tra Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство

Toulouse, France (SPX) Aug 14, 2017
MetOp-C is the third and final satellite of the first generation of MetOp polar-orbiting meteorological satellites.
The payload module of MetOp-C, developed and built by Airbus in Germany, was delivered to Toulouse after it completed a series of tests at ESTEC, the technical centre of the European Space Agency (ESA) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.
The satellite, weighing in at four to Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство, METOP-C

For those of us interested in working in the telecommunications, space or aerospace industry, here's a listing of several dozen useful places to begin the search.

The list includes direct links to the job pages of some of the largest Canadian space companies and a couple of interesting international organizations.

But please note that some of these jobs require security clearances, passports, work permits, landed immigrant status and/or even the acquisition of citizenship from the country where the job just happens to be located.

The 100 Top Aerospace Companies of 2017 - What better place to start than with the biggest and fastest growing firms in this area. Produced by Defence News, the report outlines the trends in the industry and ranks the top companies by revenues and profitability.

The Association of Spaceflight Professionals - The former US based, Astronauts for Hire, a 501(c)(3) non-profit formed in 2010 to recruit and train qualified scientists and engineers for the rigors of spaceflight, re-branded itself under this new name in June 2017. Much like A4H, the new ASP conducts a range of activities related to commercial astronaut workforce development, mission planning, operations support and research.

The Bigelow Aerospace Career Page - Where better to discover "your place in space," than the firm which just recently received backing from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). As outlined in the February 25th, 2015 Yahoo News post, "Business On the Moon: FAA Backs Bigelow Aerospace," the company has been encouraged by a variety of US Federal government agencies to continue the development of private sector applications for use on the Moon and elsewhere in space.

The Epiq Space Job Board - This San Diego, California, based company is an online community dedicated to the satellite industry. The site was developed by industry veterans for engineers, scientists, suppliers, service providers and others who want to find products, companies, resources, industry news and career opportunities related to the satellite industry.

The European Space Agency (ESA) Career Page - As private business slowly begins to eclipse government in importance over the next few years, these government jobs will slowly begin drying up, so get them while they still available.

HE Space - Denmark-based specialist supplier of manpower for space programs with offices in the Netherlands, Germany and the US. The firm also manages the Jobs in Space Linked-In group.

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) - Even in space, there are opportunities for those who are looking for something a little different from the traditional science or engineering degree. The IAMAW represents more than 40,000 Canadian workers in air transport and a wide range of manufacturing including aircraft, auto parts, buses, aerospace, electronics, light and heavy machinery, tools and appliances.

The NewSpace Global listing of top 1000 NewSpace companies - This list is divided up into three smaller lists covering the most influential privately held companies, a second list covering additional privately held companies perceived as being "on the bubble" of growth (NSG OTB) plus a third list of top rated publicly traded space companies (the NSG PTC). A surprising number of companies on these three lists are Canadian and a surprising number of the rest have offices and employment opportunities in Canada.

NewSpace People - British based, database driven head-hunting firm with 1000's of listings which bills itself as "the business network for the space industry's global professionals and companies." Offers business development and recruitment campaigns, plus "free access to a global network growing by over 5% each month. Our business network is diverse with over 3,000 director-level decision makers, covering 100s of startup founders, chief executives of established space and satellite corporations, and venture capitalists from the global investment community."

The Space Job Market- A recruitment site designed to help job seekers join the right circles through networking and building personal contacts, where they can meet people in the space industry who are able to hire them. According to CEO and founder Paul Koronka, "Space has inadvertently evolved a closed shop that locks out newcomers and makes it difficult even for established people to advance our careers. And yet employers are crying out for new talent."

The Telesat Canada listing of Current Job Opportunities - The iconic Canadian company, which helped launch a communications revolution in the North back in the 1970's, is still going strong. It's also still looking for a few good people to help administer its current fleet of satellites.

The Wisdom.com listing of Aerospace Company Jobs - India's top jobs site has a large section of employment opportunities, as befitting a nation with one of the fastest growing indigenous space industries. But the real surprise is the number of international position which show up after a basic search.

The Work in Space Global Space Directory – Compiled by KNM Media Kent Ltd., a "marketing and publishing company specialising in the aerospace, defence, space and security/law enforcement markets." Hundreds of listings from dozens of companies.

Paris (AFP) Aug 10, 2017
A house-sized asteroid will shave past our planet on October 12, far inside the Moon's orbit but without posing any threat, astronomers said Thursday.
The space rock will zoom by harmlessly at a distance of about 44,000 kilometres (27,300 miles) - an eighth of the distance from the Earth to the Moon, according to the European Space Agency,
This is just far enough to miss our geostationa Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство, Planet Labs

WASHINGTON — Italian small satellite builder Sitael has signed Virgin Orbit to send a technology demonstration satellite into low-Earth orbit next year.

Sitael’s µHETsat, a demonstrator for a new electric propulsion system built with the European and Italian space agencies, will fly on LauncherOne “mid-next year,” Dan Hart, Virgin Orbit Chief Executive, told SpaceNews Aug. 11.

Virgin Orbit is preparing to begin commercial services with LauncherOne, its air-launched small satellite orbital vehicle, in 2018. Other customers for the launch system, which can carry 500 kilograms to LEO, include NASA, OneWeb, and Sky and Space Global.

“As a small satellite customer, we are very excited for our innovative SITAEL technologies to get the flexibility and service of a primary payload on a dedicated small launch vehicle by Virgin Orbit,” Nicola Zaccheo, Sitael CEO, said in an Aug. 11 statement. “The satellite, developed in partnership with Italian Space Agency and European Space Agency, is the first all-electric micro satellite ever in space, validating both the SITAEL bus (S-75 platform) and SITAEL low power Hall Effect Thruster (HT100).”

LauncherOne is carried on the wing of a modified Boeing 747-400 aircraft named Cosmic Girl to an altitude of around 10.6 kilometers (35,000 feet). From there the launcher detaches and carries spacecraft to LEO.

It was all smallsats this week at the Small Satellite Conference in Utah. However, the conversations about smallsats’ place in our industry has been going on for quite a while. And this 2006 article from our archives is proof. Back then we talked to ESA, Orbital, Surrey Satellite, Ball Aerospace, and more, about the growing impact small satellites were beginning to have in the commercial industry, as well as the challenges and opportunities these spacecraft faced 11 years ago.
This article was originally published in December 2006.

Big satellites are the workhorses of the satellite industry, but smaller spacecraft are performing more and more missions as a growing number of customers are finding that small satellites are rugged, affordable and can perform many jobs.

According to Luca Maresi, a systems engineer at European Space Agency’s (ESA) European Space Research and Technology Center, a growing number of large institutional players such as ESA, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the French space agency, CNES, are using small satellites not only as technology demonstrators but also for operations. “In the early 1990s, small satellites were mainly designed and built by universities and research centers for experiments and to demonstrate satellite in-flight capabilities. Most of these experiments ended with a single flight without any significant follow-on activities,” says Maresi, who also co-chairs the biannual Small Satellite Systems and Services Symposium, which gathered 150 experts from more than 70 companies and research institutes in Sardinia in September.

Small satellites traditionally have been the domain of researchers and universities, but it is the geosynchronous market that has seen the most significant shift in the demand. Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp. has provided its Star-2 small geosynchronous spacecraft for customers such as Optus Networks of Australia, PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia and the former Panamsat, and as recently as April announced a contract to provide a platform to France’s Alcatel Alenia Space, which is providing the AMC-21 satellite for New Jersey-based SES Americom.

“Throughout the past five years, Orbital’s most visible successes have come in the commercial market, with the Star platform becoming the dominant small satellite for commercial satellite operators,” says Ali Atia, senior vice president of Geo Satellites for Orbital. “As a percentage of the company’s overall revenue, commercial satellites now make up about a third of Orbital’s projected 2006 revenues of almost $800 million. That is up from approximately 10 percent of a smaller revenue base just five years ago.”

Orbital is under contract to build and deliver 16 additional satellites and 12 major subsystems throughout the next three years, says Atia, who attributes this strong growth in the in the commercial communications sector to the fact that satellite operators are seeking a better balance between available capacity and customer demand than existed at the beginning of the decade. “They have learned that a large, expensive, high-powered satellite is not always the right answer for their fleet plan. Often, an established operator needs incremental capacity to augment its fleet rather than the large amount of capacity that a large satellite would add,” says Atia. “Satellite operators have become more disciplined in their deployment of capital. In many cases, it works to the advantage of a satellite operator to purchase one small satellite now, and then deploy additional capital for a second small satellite a couple years later, once they determine there is customer demand sufficient to justify the additional capital spending.” The traditional metric of “cost per transponder year” is giving way to a new metric, “cost of a revenue-producing transponder year,” says Atia. “A small satellite represents less risk to the business plan than beginning with a more expensive, harder-to-fill satellite.”

Carl Marchetto, executive vice president and general manager of Orbital’s Space Systems Group, also sees increased interest from the U.S. government in the role that small satellite systems can play in national security space programs, “where the longer-term trend is toward more responsive, faster-to-orbit space systems that can deliver critical information to the battlefield theater in a time of conflict,” he says. “We do expect that the market for science-related satellites that are primarily funded by NASA will be relatively flat for the next couple of years as the space agency focuses on moving beyond Earth orbit to implementing its Vision for Space Exploration with new initiatives,” he says.

New Earth-Observation Constellations

While making gains in the commercial arena, small satellites also are expanding their roles in other areas such as Earth observation. A five-nation consortium operates the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC), which can generate images of disaster areas around the globe. Participants include the United Kingdom, Algeria, Nigeria, Turkey and China, which all operate small DMC satellites built by U.K.-based Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. The basic satellite carries an imaging payload that can collect images with a ground resolution of 32 meters and a swath width of more than 640 kilometers. Turkey’s Bilsat-1 also carries an imager that can produce black-and-white images with 12-meter resolution and color images with 24-meter resolution, while China’s Beijing-1 adds a camera that collects 4-meter imagery. About 10 percent of the capacity of these satellites is made available for support to the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters. When not being used for disaster monitoring, the satellites are available for use by the owner for national applications and the remaining time can be used for commercial imaging that is sold by DMC International Imaging Ltd.

The constellation is expanding. In October, Deimos Imaging SL ordered a satellite dubbed Deimos, while in early November, the National Space Research and Development Agency ordered an additional DMC satellite, Nigeriasat-1. Germany’s Rapideye also has commissioned a constellation of five microsatellites to provide imagery at 6.5-meter resolution in five spectral bands from a team that includes Surrey Satellite and Canada’s MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. The images will be used primarily for agricultural and cartographic information services.

“In addition to constellations, [Surrey Satellite] remains committed to producing affordable one-off satellites, and re-use of module designs, [and] judicious use of [off-the-shelf commercial] technology. Short time-scale and one-roof design and manufacture are all enduring keys to the lower-cost, small-satellite approach,” says Martin Sweeting, CEO of Surrey Satellite. “Nevertheless, the increasing acceptance of constellations of satellites is an interesting development that is closely coupled to the concept of keeping the costs down. Not only does the constellation produce major technical benefits such as increased temporal and spatial coverage supporting new user capabilities and applications, but also, the higher volume of satellites in production can be used to bring the individual satellite cost down further.”

Large space companies such as France-based EADS Space also are marketing small satellites for Earth observation and other missions. “The EADS Space strategy for Earth observation is to serve the full market with a portfolio of products covering microsats, minisats and XL minisats and large satellites up to 4.5 tons,” says Michel Bouffard, director of Earth observation, navigation and science for EADS Space. His company has also entered into a partnership agreement with Antrix, the commercial arm of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) to jointly build and market small commercial satellites based on EADS Space-Astrium payloads and ISRO platform technology. The joint venture has received contracts to build the Eutelsat-W2M satellite and the Highly Adaptable Satellite (Hylas), a new broadband telecom and high-definition TV satellite owned by Avanti Screenmedia Group PLC, which is working with ESA on the project. EADS Astrium, which serves as Hylas’ prime contractor, will be designing and building the payload, while Antrix will integrate and test the satellite in addition to supplying the bus.

Alcatel Alenia Space’s strategy is to combine standard platforms with customized payloads to provide efficient solutions for the imminent wave of satellite fleet renewal, says Blaise Jaeger, head of telecommunications activities for Alcatel Alenia Space. “Our company is willing to partner with other satellite manufacturers as long as it provides the best value for the customer,” he says. “Our ongoing [research-and-development] effort aims at making fleet management much easier by offering in-orbit reconfiguration of satellite missions thanks to flexible payloads.”

Sweeting is not running from the larger competition and is instead moving Surrey Satellite’s small spacecraft technology into new arenas. “Some of the larger traditional aerospace companies are also developing satellites with reduced size and cost to address the same market,” says Sweeting. “In spite of this overlap, [Surrey Satellite] is still able to compete in the provision of a wide range of capabilities, from lowest-cost small technology demonstrators to more sophisticated commercial turnkey products. [Surrey Satellite] is now offering its geostationary satellites for the lower-power end of the [geosynchronous orbit] market, with the intention that low-cost satellites may make the same impact on the [geosynchronous] world as it has on the [low-Earth orbit] world.”

Obstacles Remain

While there is progress being made in the small satellite market, some problems must still be addressed when it comes to the adoption of standards and the shortening of integration time. Standards are still being defined and modularity still has a long way to go, Maresi says. “We see some of the units that are recurrently used on many satellites. This may generate de facto standards in the future, but we are not yet at the point where we can say we have [achieved] modular design across various suppliers,” says Maresi, who adds that high launch costs remain the bottleneck for the development of small satellites.

A successful first flight of the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Secondary Payload Adapter (ESPA) would represent a long-awaited step forward in solving the problems of finding a ride into space. The oft-delayed ESPA, developed by CSA Engineering for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate, is designed to carry up to six satellites weighing 180 kilograms apiece in a ring configuration below the primary payload of either of the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles. The first flight of the ring is scheduled to take place in January aboard a Lockheed Martin Atlas-5 rocket as part of the Air Force’s Space Test Program-1 mission. The primary payload is the Orbital Express mission, an in-space refueling demonstration mission sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The first ESPA mission, which had been scheduled to take place aboard a Boeing Delta-4 vehicle until the Air Force switched the mission to Lockheed Martin as part of Boeing’s punishment for contract violations committed during the Evolved Expandable Launch Vehicle competition, will deploy four small satellites: FalconSat-3 for the U.S. Air Force Academy, Midstar-1 for the U.S. Naval Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School Satellite (NPSat-1) and the Cibola Flight Experiment Satellite (CFESat) built for the Pentagon by the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

A successful flight will bring hope to many small satellite manufacturers and potential customers who have waited for many years for a chance to launch their spacecraft. To further reduce the cost and improve the efficiency of future experimental missions, a new satellite also is being developed: The Space Test Program/Standard Interface Vehicle, which will have a standard bus-to-payload interface, is sponsored by the Air Force’s Space Development & Test Wing and will meet the ESPA volume and weight constraints, says Dan Brophy, director of defense systems for Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. “Access to space has traditionally been a challenge for small satellite missions,” he says. “ESPA will operate as a kind of bus to space in that smaller payloads will fly along, provided they are ready to go. Otherwise, the mission will go ahead and not wait. In all instances, the primary mission takes priority.”

Reliability Is Key

All satellites, regardless of size, must be reliable. For small satellite manufacturers, the rules do not change even if there is less room to work with. “Reliability, which is influenced largely by connection failures, is improving. What we are seeing today is not only the use of far fewer interconnects due to higher density electronics, but also that most satellites, regardless of size, are lasting beyond their intended design life,” says Brophy.

Many small satellites are built to undertake high-risk missions, something that commercial ventures eagerly avoid, Maresi says. “More reliable small satellites can surely be built with the present understanding, and we recently had some good examples of small satellites exceeding their design lifetime,” he says. “This was surprising, not only to those who were skeptical about the capability of commercial electronics to survive radiation in the space environment, but to those who designed the systems as well.”

As problems such as launch options and reliability are corrected, you can bet that there will be plenty of innovative space players eager to put their payloads aboard small satellites.

Discovered back in 2012, astronomers are once again at the edge of their seats as an asteroid dubbed "TC4" is scheduled to scoot past Earth at a distance of 27,300 miles on October 2, European Space Agency officials said Thursday. Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство

WASHINGTON — David Williams, chief executive of broadband satellite operator Avanti Communications, has parted ways with the company he co-founded.

London-based Avanti announced July 10 that Williams was leaving the company and its board of directors. A non-executive board director, Alan Harper, is taking his place as an interim CEO effective immediately, the company said. Harper has been at Avanti for five months.

Williams started Avanti in 2000, according to LinkedIn, with David Bestwick, who continues to serve as the company’s technical director. Avanti has struggled to finance its latest satellite, the high-throughput Hylas-4 from Orbital ATK, having pulled the full $100 million gained through a three-year super senior facility in June to ensure the satellite is funded through construction and launch on an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket later this year.

Avanti said it will soon begin a search for a new full-time CEO to replace Harper.

“I have been honoured to work with such a talented and dedicated team who have contributed so much to this Company,” Williams said in an Aug. 10 statement. “They should be proud of what they have built and I am confident that the excellent service they deliver to customers will see Avanti continue to grow and flourish.”

Avanti operates a fleet of three satellites — Hylas 1, Hylas 2 and the Artemis satellite, the latter of which formerly belonged to the European Space Agency — has a Ka-band beam on SES’s Astra-5B rebranded as Hylas-2B, and two other payloads under construction.

Hylas-3, a hosted payload built into ESA’s European Data Relay Satellite C, carries 8 Ka-band beams; Hylas-4 will have 66 fixed beams covering Africa and Europe, and four steerable beams capable of reaching as far as Latin America.

Avanti reported a $16 million increase in revenue for the quarter ended June 30 to $62 million, and in May said the company would be begin targeting the mobility markets of aviation, maritime, and land, including the connected car. Previously Avanti had directed its focus on satellite to national telecom operators across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

NASA said Wednesday that the Falcon 9 launch of a Dragon cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station had been delayed from Sunday to Monday at 12:31 p.m. Eastern.

Neither NASA nor SpaceX disclosed the reason for the slip. With a launch Monday, the Dragon spacecraft will arrive at the station early Wednesday. [NASA]

More News

EchoStar has ordered an “ultra high density” broadband satellite from Space Systems Loral. The Jupiter-3/EchoStar-24 satellite, scheduled for launch in 2021, will provide 500 gigabits per second of capacity for broadband services in the Americas. EchoStar first mentioned plans for Jupiter-3 in February 2016, saying at the time that it expected to make an announcement about its plans for the satellite in a few months. SSL’s parent company, MDA Corp., hinted at the order in a recent earnings call when it mentioned a pending order for a $400 million satellite. [SpaceNews]

The smallsat market could be worth up to $30 billion in the next decade, according to a recent report. A study by Euroconsult concluded that as many as 6,200 small satellites will launch in the next decade, with a market value of $30.1 billion, compared to $8.7 billion in the previous decade. Much of that growth is linked to plans for a number of smallsat constellations. European satellite developers said that while they also saw growth in the market, many factors could keep the industry from growing as fast as the forecast estimates. [SpaceNews]

NASA has selected several astrophysics mission proposals for further study. The agency said Wednesday it chose three missions for nine-month concept studies, valued at $2 million each, for its Medium-Class Explorer program. Those missions would perform x-ray astronomy, a near-infrared all-sky survey and spectroscopy of exoplanets. NASA also selected three smaller “missions of opportunity” for study; those involve instruments that would fly on high-altitude balloons, the space station or a proposed European mission. [NASA]

The moon may have had a magnetic field of its own far longer than previously thought. Scientists knew the moon had a magnetic field early in its history, but thought it disappeared about 3.5 billion years ago as the lunar interior cooled and shut down the dynamo there that powered it. Analysis of rocks returned from the Apollo 15 mission found evidence that the lunar magnetic field may have still been operating between 1 billion and 2.5 billion years ago. The finding suggests that exoplanets once considered too small to have a long-lasting magnetic field might be able to retain one, enhancing their habitability. [The Guardian]

LOGAN, Utah — A Swiss company with plans to deploy 64 cubesat-class spacecraft by 2021 to support Internet of Things applications has raised an initial $3 million funding round.

ELSE announced Aug. 8 that it closed the $3 million seed round with several investors, led by Airbus Ventures, the early-stage investment arm of Airbus Group, that will support the company through the deployment of two demonstration spacecraft next year.

“We have a strong group of investors, and certainly having Airbus Ventures behind us is really big,” said Kjell Karlsen, chief executive officer of ELSE, in an Aug. 8 interview here. “That could also lead to some potential industrial cooperation.”

“We believe in the development of machine-to-machine communications and we have been convinced by the cost-effective innovative satellite constellation and network technology which ELSE will be providing,” Francois Auque, chairman of the board of Airbus Ventures, said in a statement about the funding round. “We are happy to foster further cooperation between ELSE and Airbus.”

ELSE will use the funding round, as well as existing awards from the European Space Agency and the Swiss government, to complete development of the first two satellites in its Astrocast system. “This seed round allows us to do that,” Karlsen said. “That will take us through the demonstration missions next year.”

Assembly of those first two satellites, three-unit cubesats, has started, he said, as the company moves into a new, larger headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland. ELSE has arranged with Seattle-based Spaceflight for the launch of one of them, and is finalizing a contract for a separate launch of the second.

“We’re moving forward and hitting all of our targets for our launches next year,” he said.

Those demonstration satellites will be followed by a constellation of 64 satellites, which Karlsen said will begin in the first quarter in 2019. Those satellites will be launched eight at a time into separate planes to provide global coverage. ELSE expects the constellation to be complete by 2021 at a total cost of less than $50 million.

That low development cost, he said, a key selling point for the Astrocast system and its communication services. “A lot of interest is from guys who were not necessarily thinking about satellites because they had this perception that satellite services were too expensive,” he said.

Karlsen said ELSE has agreements with three European companies to serve as pilot customers for the demonstration satellites. Those companies are in the marine, fishing and mobile industries. “As more news comes out about our application, we see a huge interest from a lot of industries that we never thought about,” he said.

He added that he expects the company’s partnership with Thuraya, the mobile satellite operator, will help identify additional customers. While Thuraya did not participate in the funding round, it is supporting ELSE with sales and regulatory issues.

ELSE is already started planning for a larger Series A round needed for the development of the full-scale constellation. Karlsen said most of the investors in the seed round have already committed to participating in the Series A round, which he expects to close in 2018.

WASHINGTON — Satellite fleet operator EchoStar of Englewood, Colorado, revealed Aug. 9 it had signed a contract with Space Systems Loral for the long-awaited Jupiter-3/EchoStar-24 satellite meant to further propel the company’s broadband internet success in the Americas and compete head to head with ViaSat’s forthcoming ViaSat-3 system.

In a conference call with investors and in statements from EchoStar and SSL, the companies described Jupiter-3 as an “ultra high density satellite,” capable of beaming honed capacity to concentrated areas of interest for connectivity services.

“After almost a year of hard work, we believe we have come up with an optimum design for an ultra high density satellite, and we’ve awarded a contract to SSL to build this satellite to be called EchoStar-24/Jupiter-3,” Pradman Kaul, president of Hughes Network Systems, said Aug 9. “This new satellite will provide a dramatic increase in capacity in our key markets in the Americas at a very competitive cost per bit.

“It will enable us to offer speeds of 100Mbps per second and higher to the subscriber. The coverage will be optimised to cover where we anticipate demand rather than uniform blanket coverage. All our traditional markets, including consumer, enterprise, aeronautical, cellular backhaul and community Wi-Fi will be served.”

When EchoStar first mentioned Jupiter-3 a year and a half ago in February 2016, the company expected to make an announcement “in the next few months.” Satellite operator ViaSat in Carlsbad, California had at the time just revealed ViaSat-3, a global system of three “high capacity” broadband satellites each advertising at least 1 terabit per second of capacity.

In an Aug. 9 statement, SSL said the satellite “will feature an entirely new architecture based on a broad range of technology advances including the miniaturization of electronics, solid state amplifiers, and more efficient antenna designs.”

Jupiter-3 is expected to have a total throughput of 500Gbps and to launch in 2021; ViaSat expects to launch the first ViaSat-3, which will also cover the Americas, in 2020.

Building Jupiter-2’s Business

EchoStar’s most recent Hughes satellite, the 220Gbps Jupiter-2/EchoStar-19, launched Dec. 18 on an Atlas 5 rocket and entered service in March, giving the company a few months lead over competitor ViaSat. An Ariane 5 launched the 300Gbps ViaSat-2 on June 1. Both EchoStar and ViaSat have been waiting on additional capacity since their existing Jupiter-1 and ViaSat-1 satellites have about as many residential broadband subscribers as they can take. ViaSat said Aug. 8 that ViaSat-2 should enter service during its fiscal fourth quarter 2018, which translates to the first three months of the calendar year 2018.

Kaul said the 120 spot beam Jupiter-2 satellite already hosts more than 200,000 of the company’s 1,085,000 subscribers. The company added 41,000 net subscribers for the three months ended June 30.

ViaSat reported a loss of 34,000 subscribers for the quarter ended June 30, which CEO Mark Dankberg told investors Aug. 8 was due in part to competition from “unlimited mobile LTE plans and the new Hughes Jupiter-2 plans.”

A transition by Dish from working with both EchoStar and ViaSat on a wholesale basis to a sales agent approach also negatively impacted subscriber numbers for both companies.

Kaul estimated that around 18 million households in the U.S. fall into EchoStar’s core market of unserved or underserved locations. He estimated only 10 percent of those households have been tapped into today, and that Hughes has 60 percent of that market.

Hughes is also targeting broadband markets in Canada through customer Xplornet, an internet service provider, in Mexico with media company customer StarGroup, and in Brazil through its Hughes Network Systems do Brasil division. Kaul said Jupiter-2 will start service in Colombia later this year, followed by other Latin American countries.

“We are confident that over the next four years that we are constructing Jupiter-3, that we will not only fill up Jupiter-2, but we will probably end up with many beams on Jupiter-2 being full and having to go into a managed mode like we had to do with Jupiter-1 for a while,” he said.

Hughes Network Systems do Brasil is also using capacity on Eutelsat’s 65 West A satellite, which launched in March 2016, for 15 years. Additionally, EchoStar purchased capacity over Brazil on Telesat’s Telstar-19 Vantage satellite, which is expected to launch in mid-2018 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Additional fleet updates

Michael Dugan, EchoStar’s president and CEO, said EchoStar has regained contact with EchoStar-3, a 20-year old satellite that malfunctioned during a recent maneuver, but still lacks control of the spacecraft.

“We’ve subsequently reestablished communication with the satellite, and are working with the manufacturer to restore sufficient command to move it into a retirement orbit,” he said.

EchoStar is sitting on $3.27 billion as of June 30 in cash, cash equivalents and marketable investment securities, most of which the company has not publicly detailed a plan for. Dugan said that the company anticipates around $500 million in capital expenditures for this year, and about the same next year.

Brazil is a potential area for further investment since EchoStar gained rights to Ku-, Ka-, and S-band frequencies there in 2012. In an Aug. 9 filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, EchoStar said it met Brazil’s regulatory in-service obligations for Ku-band with EchoStar-23, a broadcast satellite launched in March 2017 by SpaceX, and is “exploring options for the Ka-band and S-band spectrums.”

“We have sought an extension of the S- and Ka-band milestones, which may or may not be granted, and, if granted, may be subject to additional conditions, penalties or other requirements,” the company wrote.

EchoStar has one more satellite, EchoStar-105/SES-11, launching this year on what Spaceflight Now reports will be a pre-flown Falcon 9 rocket. Ordered from European manufacturer Airbus Defence and Space, EchoStar intends to lease the Ku-band payload from SES for 10 years with an option to extend on an annual basis thereafter. The C-, Ku-, and Ka-band satellite is a replacement for SES’s 13-year old AMC-15.

Rendition of the UNSW-Ec0 satellite, Australia’s first in 15 years. Photo: University of New South Wales.

Australia should model its proposed national space agency on the Canadian example, according to the Space Industry Association of Australia (SIAA). SIAA secretary Peter Nikoloff said a national space agency with clear space policies would allow Australia to find niche areas in the international arena.

“When people mention the space agency they think of NASA or the European Space Agency (ESA), where they are doing big rocket launches and spending billions of dollars on going to other planets; but from our perspective, that’s not practical in Australia to establish those sort of exploration projects,” he said. “The Canadians are a good example because their population and economy is not that much bigger than Australia’s but they have had a space agency for many years.”

SIAA released a white paper in March calling on the Australian government to establish a national space agency. The association had hoped for an announcement just before or during next month’s International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in the South Australian capital Adelaide.

However, the announcement last month of a federal government review into the long-term plan for the sector in Australia, which will not be complete until March, means any meaningful pledge of an Australian apace agency is unlikely at next month’s congress.

The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) was formed in 1989 and is best known for its robotics technology and astronaut program. Canada’s most famous robotic achievement, Canadarm, made its first trip to space in 1981 aboard Space Shuttle Columbia. Canadarm2 was launched in 2001 and has played a pivotal role on the International Space Station (ISS).

In 2015, the space sector supported more than 24,000 jobs in Canada, which at the time had a population of about 35.5 million, compared with Australia’s 23.7 million.

Nikoloff said a coordinated space agency in Australia could lead to similar success in the country.

“Because of that investment and involvement (in Canada), they’ve been given access for an astronaut to go to the Space Station, which is a massive benefit and incentive for people to get involved in STEM subjects,” he said. “Also, their robotics work in space is just as important on Earth so that investment is not just all for space exploration and exciting stuff, it’s also got very good spin-offs and that’s the way we’ve got to think about it.

Rocket Lab says its first Electron launch was cut short by a telemetry glitch. The company said in a statement late Sunday that a software configuration error, made by a contractor handling ground systems for range safety, created a loss of data that required range safety officials to terminate the launch about four minutes after liftoff. Rocket Lab said that its own telemetry indicates the rocket was performing normally on that May flight up until the flight was terminated. The company plans to roll the next Electron out to the pad in about eight weeks for a second test flight. If that launch is successful, the company will move ahead into commercial operations. [SpaceNews]

A military weather satellite is expected to stop functioning next month. The Air Force’s Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Flight 19 satellite malfunctioned in orbit in February 2016, less than two years after launch, losing the ability to be commanded by the ground. The spacecraft has been providing tactical weather data since then, but the satellite is expected to lose attitude control by late next month, depriving the spacecraft of power. The Air Force said the loss of DMSP-F19 will not have an effect on the service’s strategic weather mission. [SpaceNews]

Virgin Galactic performed a “dry run” of a powered SpaceShipTwo flight on Friday. The sixth glide flight of the second SpaceShipTwo included most of the suborbital spaceplane’s hybrid propulsion system, including a propellant tank filled with nitrous oxide. The company called the latest glide flight “essentially a dry run for rocket-powered flights,” but has not set a firm schedule for when those flights will begin. [SpaceNews]

China’s first space laboratory module is expected to reenter by early 2018. The orbit of Tiangong-1 has been slowly decaying since a final reboost maneuver in late 2015. The Chinese government informed the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs that it expects the spacecraft to reenter between October 2017 and April 2018. An analysis by the Aerospace Corporation predicts a reentry in January 2018, give or take two months. Most of the spacecraft is expected to burn up on reentry. [Space.com]

London, UK (The Conversation) Jul 13, 2017 -
The 1.65 billion euro BepiColombo spacecraft is now being unstacked for final tests after being displayed in its launch configuration to the world's press at the European Space Agency's Space Technology and Research Centre. The six-metre high assembly will soon be shipped to Kourou in French Guyana where it is anticipated to launch in October 2018.

This is the culmination of nearly two decades of work by a team of highly motivated scientists and engineers, many of whom I have come to know through my own role on the mission.

BepiColombo is an impressive mission, jointly owned by the European and Japanese space agencies (ESA and JAXA). A European "ion-drive unit" (MTM, Mercury Transfer Module) will propel the assembly during its seven-year cruise before achieving orbit about the sun's nearest planet.

It will fly close past Mercury after less than three years, but will have to continue orbiting the sun, making five more flybys of Mercury - using its gravitational attraction to help it match velocity with the planet so that it can be captured into orbit about the planet itself.

Once in orbit, the Japanese component of the mission, the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, MMO, will be set spinning (for stability) and be released into an eccentric orbit to study the magnetic field, dust and environment of charged particles surrounding the planet. The European orbiter, known as the Mercury Planetary Orbiter, will then lower itself into a more circular orbit optimised for study of the planet's surface and interior.

Doing science in a pizza oven
The technological challenges of then operating the two vehicles in orbit extend far beyond the sheer "rocket science" of getting there. Mercury is three times closer to the sun than the Earth is, so the spacecraft will be heated by direct sunlight nearly ten times stronger than that experienced above the Earth's atmosphere.

Worse, when flying above the day-side of planet, the orbiter will be baked on its underside by "pizza-oven heat" from Mercury's searing 400 C surface only 500km below.

Parts of the spacecraft's insulated outer surface may reach 380C at times, but the sensitive electronics inside need to be kept below about -40C to function properly. Part of the solution has been to fit the orbiter with the splendidly-named "cold finger" - essentially a metal rod which conducts heat from its innards out to where it can be dumped into space via a "venetian blind" radiator panel.

The spacecraft's orientation will be controlled at all times, so that the slats of the panel will never allow direct sunlight or the radiation from the hot planet to fall on the radiator surface.

This effort scarcely needs to be justified to scientists who are greatly puzzled by what the two previous missions to Mercury - Mariner 10 (1970s) and Messenger (2011-15) - have found.

NASA's MESSENGER mission revealed that the planet's surface is surprisingly rich in "volatile" elements such as sulphur, chlorine, sodium and potassium. We would expect these to have been preferentially lost during the hot or violent birth that a planet so close to the sun should have had. Add this to the fact that Mercury's rocky shell is strangely thin compared to the Earth's and overlies a disproportionately large iron core, and its very nature poses a conundrum.

It may have originated much further from the sun than we now find it, and suffered a rock-stripping collision during inward migration.
Other questions include why part of Mercury's core is still molten and able to generate a magnetic field and why the planet shows so much evidence of past volcanic eruptions.

Cost and benefits
Whenever there is a report about a space mission it is usual to see comments from readers bemoaning the waste of money, arguing it ought to have been spent on relieving suffering here on Earth. We can all sympathise with the sentiment, but to single out the costs of space research for censure in this regard lacks a sense of proportion.

BepiColombo has cost ESA and JAXA about 1.65 billion euro between them, not bad for such a complex project, and individual national funding agencies may have spent about the same total again for salaries and instrument development.

All this money has been spent on Earth, helping the economy - it hasn't been somehow shot into space and lost. And in any case new space technology has been shown to open the way for developments such as prostate cancer "sniffer devices" and much more.

Also, let's not forget that our civilisation disposes of far more of its surplus wealth on entertainment and what might be termed "unnecessary fripperies" than on space research. For example, the annual budgets of the four largest Formula One motor racing teams exceed the total cost to ESA and JAXA for the BepiColombo mission, as do yearly global sales of lipstick.

So I'm looking ahead to BepiColombo's findings with a clear conscience. There are many things it can tell us about our part of the solar system. And, perhaps most importantly, it could inspire future generations to take an interest in science.

Chicago IL (SPX) Aug 04, 2017 -
Imagine planting a single seed and, with great precision, being able to predict the exact height of the tree that grows from it. Now imagine traveling to the future and snapping photographic proof that you were right.

If you think of the seed as the early universe, and the tree as the universe the way it looks now, you have an idea of what the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration has just done. In a presentation at the American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields meeting at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, DES scientists will unveil the most accurate measurement ever made of the present large-scale structure of the universe.

These measurements of the amount and "clumpiness" (or distribution) of dark matter in the present-day cosmos were made with a precision that, for the first time, rivals that of inferences from the early universe by the European Space Agency's orbiting Planck observatory. The new DES result (the tree, in the above metaphor) is close to "forecasts" made from the Planck measurements of the distant past (the seed), allowing scientists to understand more about the ways the universe has evolved over 14 billion years.

"This result is beyond exciting," said Scott Dodelson of Fermilab, one of the lead scientists on this result. "For the first time, we're able to see the current structure of the universe with the same clarity that we can see its infancy, and we can follow the threads from one to the other, confirming many predictions along the way."

Most notably, this result supports the theory that 26 percent of the universe is in the form of mysterious dark matter and that space is filled with an also-unseen dark energy, which is causing the accelerating expansion of the universe and makes up 70 percent.

Paradoxically, it is easier to measure the large-scale clumpiness of the universe in the distant past than it is to measure it today. In the first 400,000 years following the Big Bang, the universe was filled with a glowing gas, the light from which survives to this day. Planck's map of this cosmic microwave background radiation gives us a snapshot of the universe at that very early time.

Since then, the gravity of dark matter has pulled mass together and made the universe clumpier over time. But dark energy has been fighting back, pushing matter apart. Using the Planck map as a start, cosmologists can calculate precisely how this battle plays out over 14 billion years.

"The DES measurements, when compared with the Planck map, support the simplest version of the dark matter/dark energy theory," said Joe Zuntz, of the University of Edinburgh, who worked on the analysis. "The moment we realized that our measurement matched the Planck result within 7 percent was thrilling for the entire collaboration."

The primary instrument for DES is the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera, one of the most powerful in existence, able to capture digital images of light from galaxies eight billion light-years from Earth.

The camera was built and tested at Fermilab, the lead laboratory on the Dark Energy Survey, and is mounted on the National Science Foundation's 4-meter Blanco telescope, part of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a division of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. The DES data are processed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Scientists on DES are using the camera to map an eighth of the sky in unprecedented detail over five years. The fifth year of observation will begin in August. The new results released today draw from data collected only during the survey's first year, which covers 1/30th of the sky.

"It is amazing that the team has managed to achieve such precision from only the first year of their survey," said National Science Foundation Program Director Nigel Sharp. "Now that their analysis techniques are developed and tested, we look forward with eager anticipation to breakthrough results as the survey continues."

DES scientists used two methods to measure dark matter. First, they created maps of galaxy positions as tracers, and second, they precisely measured the shapes of 26 million galaxies to directly map the patterns of dark matter over billions of light-years, using a technique called gravitational lensing.

To make these ultraprecise measurements, the DES team developed new ways to detect the tiny lensing distortions of galaxy images, an effect not even visible to the eye, enabling revolutionary advances in understanding these cosmic signals. In the process, they created the largest guide to spotting dark matter in the cosmos ever drawn (see image). The new dark matter map is 10 times the size of the one DES released in 2015 and will eventually be three times larger than it is now.

"It's an enormous team effort and the culmination of years of focused work," said Erin Sheldon, a physicist at the DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory, who co-developed the new method for detecting lensing distortions.

These results and others from the first year of the Dark Energy Survey will be released online and announced during a talk by Daniel Gruen, NASA Einstein fellow at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, at 5 p.m. Central time. The talk is part of the APS Division of Particles and Fields meeting at Fermilab and will be streamed live.

The results will also be presented by Kavli fellow Elisabeth Krause of the Kavli Insitute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at SLAC at the TeV Particle Astrophysics Conference in Columbus, Ohio, on Aug. 9; and by Michael Troxel, postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics at Ohio State University, at the International Symposium on Lepton Photon Interactions at High Energies in Guanzhou, China, on Aug. 10. All three of these speakers are coordinators of DES science working groups and made key contributions to the analysis.

"The Dark Energy Survey has already delivered some remarkable discoveries and measurements, and they have barely scratched the surface of their data," said Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer. "Today's world-leading results point forward to the great strides DES will make toward understanding dark energy in the coming years."

Menlo Park CA (SPX) Aug 07, 2017 -
Astrophysicists have a fairly accurate understanding of how the universe ages: That's the conclusion of new results from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), a large international science collaboration, including researchers from the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, that put models of cosmic structure formation and evolution to the most precise test yet.

The survey's researchers analyzed light from 26 million galaxies to study how structures in the universe have changed over the past 7 billion years - half the age of the universe. The data were taken with the DECam, a 570-megapixel camera attached to the 4-meter Victor M. Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

Previously, the most precise test of cosmological models came from measurements with the European Space Agency's Planck satellite of what is known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB) - a faint glow in the sky emitted 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

"While Planck looked at the structure of the very early universe, DES has measured structures that evolved much later," said Daniel Gruen, a NASA Einstein postdoctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), a joint institute of Stanford University and SLAC. "The growth of these structures from the early ages of the universe until today agrees with what our models predict, showing that we can describe cosmic evolution very well."

Gruen will present the results, which are based on the first year of data from the 5-year-long survey, today at the 2017 Division of Particles and Fields meeting of the American Physical Society at the DOE's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

KIPAC faculty member Risa Wechsler, a founding member of DES, said, "For the first time, the precision of key cosmological parameters coming out of a galaxy survey is comparable to the ones derived from measurements of the cosmic microwave background. This allows us to test our models independently and combine both approaches to obtain parameter values with unprecedented precision."

Largest Map of Mass Distribution
The standard model of cosmology, called Lambda-CDM, includes two key ingredients. Cold dark matter (CDM), an invisible form of matter that is five times more prevalent than regular matter, clumps together and is at the heart of the formation of structures such as galaxies and galaxy clusters. Lambda, the cosmological constant, describes the accelerated expansion of the universe, driven by an unknown force referred to as dark energy.

Astrophysicists need precise tests of the model because its ingredients are not completely certain. Dark matter has never been directly detected. Dark energy is even more mysterious, and it's not known whether it actually is a constant or changes over time.

DES has now succeeded in carrying out such a precision test. The scientists used the fact that images of faraway galaxies get slightly distorted by the gravity of galaxies in the foreground - an effect known as weak gravitational lensing. This analysis led to the largest map ever constructed for the distribution of mass - both regular and dark matter - in the universe, as well as its evolution over time.

"Within an error bar of less than 5 percent, the combined Planck and DES results are consistent with Lambda-CDM," Wechsler said. "This also means that, so far, we don't need anything but a constant form of dark energy to describe the expansion history of the universe."

Key Contributions from KIPAC
In addition to Gruen, who led the weak lensing working group, and Wechsler, whose group provided realistic simulations of the survey critical to testing several aspects of the cosmological analysis, a large number of KIPAC scientists, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and alumni have made crucial contributions to DES - from building the instrument to developing theory and simulations and analyzing the data.

Postdoctoral fellow Elisabeth Krause, for example, leads the DES theory and combined probes working group. In that role, she led the charge in developing theoretical models that match the experimental precision obtained with the DES data. This involved writing computer codes that calculate what weak gravitational lensing should look like for a given model.

"Different people develop slightly different codes that are meant to do the same thing," she said. "I helped bring code developers together to cross-check their results and to make sure that we get the most precise theory codes possible."

Another key to the creation of the mass distribution map was to accurately determine the distances to the observed galaxies - information that is usually derived from independent surveys that analyze the properties of light coming from those objects or from exploding stars.

"We've shown that we can use the color of certain red galaxies - red is the color they would have if you were right in front of them - to determine how far they are away," said SLAC staff scientist Eli Rykoff, who had a leading role in this part of the analysis. "It turns out that if we map where these red galaxies are in the sky, we can use them to calibrate the distances of the lenses and background galaxies used in the study."

Toward Even Deeper Cosmic Insights
In the near future, more DES data will allow astrophysicists to test their cosmological models with even more precision. The analysis of data collected during the first three years of the survey will begin soon, and the fifth year of observations will also soon be underway.

With even better data, the researchers said, we might find out if the relatively simple Lambda-CDM model needs to be modified.

"The methods developed for DES and the experience its researchers are gaining along the way will also benefit the natural flow of ever-evolving experiments," said KIPAC faculty member David Burke, head of SLAC's DES group.

Both will prepare scientists for future surveys, including ones with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). With its 3.2-gigapixel camera, which is under construction at SLAC, astrophysicists will be able to explore the depths of our universe like never before.

Boston MA (SPX) Aug 01, 2017 -
Many rock stars don't like to play by the rules, and a cosmic one is no exception. A team of astronomers has discovered that an extraordinarily bright supernova occurred in a surprising location. This "heavy metal" supernova discovery challenges current ideas of how and where such super-charged supernovas occur.

Supernovas are some of the most energetic events in the universe. When a massive star runs out of fuel, it can collapse onto itself and create a spectacular explosion that briefly outshines an entire galaxy, dispersing vital elements into space.

In the past decade, astronomers have discovered about 50 supernovas, out of the thousands known, that are particularly powerful. These explosions are up to 100 times brighter than other supernovas caused by the collapse of a massive star.

Following the recent discovery of one of these "superluminous supernovas," a team of astronomers led by Matt Nicholl from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass., has uncovered vital clues about where some of these extraordinary objects come from.

Cambridge University's Arancha Delgado and her team discovered this supernova, dubbed SN 2017egm, on May 23, 2017, with the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite. A team led by Subo Dong of the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics used the Nordic Optical Telescope to identify it as a superluminous supernova.

SN 2017egm is located in a spiral galaxy about 420 million light-years from Earth, making it about three times closer than any other superluminous supernova previously seen. Dong realized that the galaxy was very surprising, as virtually all known superluminous supernovas have been found in dwarf galaxies that are much smaller than spiral galaxies like the Milky Way.

Building on this discovery, the CfA team found that SN 2017egm's host galaxy has a high concentration of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which astronomers call "metals." This is the first clear evidence for a metal-rich birthplace for a superluminous supernova. The dwarf galaxies that usually host superluminous supernovas are known to have a low metal content, which was thought to be an essential ingredient for making these explosions.

"Superluminous supernovas were already the rock stars of the supernova world," said Nicholl. "We now know that some of them like heavy metal, so to speak, and explode in galaxies like our own Milky Way."

"If one of these went off in our own galaxy, it would be much brighter than any supernova in recorded human history and would be as bright as the full Moon," said co-author Edo Berger, also of the CfA. "However, they're so rare that we probably have to wait several million years to see one."

The CfA researchers also found more clues about the nature of SN 2017egm. In particular, their new study supports the idea that a rapidly spinning, highly magnetized neutron star, called a magnetar, is likely the engine that drives the incredible amount of light generated by these supernovas.

While the brightness of SN 2017egm and the properties of the magnetar that powers it overlap with those of other superluminous supernovas, the amount of mass ejected by SN 2017egm may be lower than the average event.

This difference may indicate that the massive star that led to SN 2017egm lost more mass than most superluminous supernova progenitors before exploding. The spin rate of the magnetar may also be slower than average.

These results show that the amount of metals has at most only a small effect on the properties of a superluminous supernova and the engine driving it. However, the metal-rich variety occurs at only about 10% of the rate of the metal-poor ones. Similar results have been found for bursts of gamma rays associated with the explosion of massive stars. This suggests a close association between these two types of objects.

From July 4th, 2017, until September 16th, 2017, the supernova is not observable because it is too close to the Sun. After that, detailed studies should be possible for at least a few more years.

"This should break all records for how long a superluminous supernova can be followed," said co-author Raffaella Margutti of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. "I'm excited to see what other surprises this object has in store for us."

President Donald Trump’s decision to retain ownership of his business while in office means that he can profit from government entities that are obligated to patronize his properties. For the Secret Service, which sets up a protective perimeter around the president and vice president’s non-White House residences, this means paying the president’s company, and by extension the president, to rent space in Trump Tower in New York. It also, apparently, makes it possible for the Secret Service to get into a dispute with the Trump Organization over the lease.

For the past few decades, setting up such details, and occasionally paying rent to the officeholder, has been common practice. Vice President Joe Biden, for example, reportedly received $2,200 per month when the agency rented a cottage he owned near his home in Delaware.

But Trump Tower, a hybrid residential and commercial building in the middle of Manhattan, is a unique case. Within days of the election, pedestrians and tourists were chafing at the increased security around the building, which Trump used as the headquarters for his transition team and where his wife Melania and youngest son Barron stayed for the first few months of his presidency. Though Trump himself has not yet stayed in the building since taking office, the Secret Service has, at a potentially unprecedented cost: The New York Postestimated in November 2016 that renting out two of the building’s floors, as the Secret Service intended to do, could cost as much as $3 million per year, meaning Trump could be profiting substantially off of the security detail. Meanwhile, according to Politico, just five days after the election, a prominent New York real-estate firm presented the heightened security as a selling point for a $2.1 million condominium in the building, illustrating yet another way the president could stand to profit from the security presence.

According to The Washington Post, the arrangement has also created tension between the Secret Service and the president’s company. In July, amid a dispute over the conditions of the lease, the Secret Service moved out of the building and into an adjacent trailer. Whether the Trump Organization and the Secret Service remain in negotiations over the lease is currently unclear.

The situation demonstrates how the president’s decision to retain his business interests conflicts with his duties as president. National-security experts have noted that even if Trump is not physically present, Trump-branded properties around the world are in increased danger precisely because of their association with the president. The Trump Organization and the Secret Service’s inability to work out a deal for Trump’s detail to stay in Trump Tower potentially puts not only the president but also the residents, employees, and customers of the business in increased danger. And if, as two anonymous sources said, price was one of the sticking points in the negotiation, that would mean the president’s business interest—that is, making as much money from renting out his properties as possible—has come into direct conflict with national security.

Another way Trump could profit from his protective detail is by having family members travel in his two planes and three helicopters. Over the course of the campaign, the Secret Service, which traditionally pays for its own travel during elections, spent $2.74 million to fly on a plane owned by one of Trump’s own companies. While in office, Trump flies on Air Force One, while Mike Pence rides Air Force Two. However, their families might still be flying on Trump’s private planes, along with their protective details, which would effectively direct even more money to Trump. (Previous first families have flown with a detail, whose legal purview covers “the immediate family members,” but none have done so on planes they themselves own.)

This system creates a set of conflicting interests for Trump regarding his own travel and residences. Though presidents as different as Dwight Eisenhower and Barack Obama have evoked partisan ire over time spent away from the White House, whether on golf courses or on vacation in Hawaii, only Donald Trump will actually have made money from his and his family’s travels. And if, while in office, Trump visits properties he owns other than Trump Tower—his buildings in other U.S. cities like Chicago and Miami, for example, or his golf course and resort in Scotland, or one of the many international hotels bearing his name—he stands to gain from the stays for which his security detail (and, by extension, taxpayers) may be paying. Moreover, the more his family members fly on his planes, whether they are running his business on his behalf or running interference with foreign leaders, the more the Secret Service will end up paying for seats alongside them.

The Background

President Donald Trump still has not taken the necessary steps to distance himself from his businesses while in office. In accordance with a plan that he and one of his lawyers, Sheri Dillon, laid out at a press conference on January 11, Trump has filed paperwork to remove himself from the day-to-day operation of his eponymous organization. However, numerous ethics experts have voiced strenuous objections to the plan, which they say does very little to resolve the issue: As long as Trump continues to profit from his business empire—which he does whether or not he is nominally in charge—they say, the possibility that outside actors will attempt to affect his policies by plumping up his pocketbook will remain very much in play.

Several of Trump’s critics have moved forward with legal action. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, filed a lawsuit alleging that Trump’s business holdings violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which makes it illegal for government officials to “accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” CREW’s bipartisan legal team includes, among others, Norm Eisen and Richard Painter, who served as ethics lawyers under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, respectively; Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University; and Zephyr Teachout, a professor at Fordham University (and former congressional candidate) who is considered an authority on the emoluments clause. All have been vocally critical of Trump’s continued refusal to sell off his business, and are now taking their case to court to argue that several of Trump’s businesses present avenues by which foreign governments could seek to influence the president by, for example, booking stays at one of his hotels or renting space at one of his properties. Additionally, the lawsuit seeks to force Trump to reveal his tax returns, something every president has done since Gerald Ford but which Trump has refused to do, significantly limiting the public’s ability to understand the president’s finances. When asked about the lawsuit, Trump described it as “totally without merit.” Eisen was quick to respond on Twitter, offering to “debate Trump (or his chosen champion) on the merits of our case anytime,” making it clear that CREW intends to continue to pursue its case. (CREW has also filed a separate complaint to the General Services Administration arguing that Trump has violated the lease on his Washington, D.C. hotel, which states that “no ... elected official of the Government of the United States … shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom.”)

Though CREW is the first group to bring a lawsuit against President Trump, it may soon have company. According to The New York Times, Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, has said that his organization is looking for a plaintiff to sue Trump for violating the emoluments clause, although with a different claim to legal standing: While CREW intends to demonstrate that the group itself has suffered financial harm because the need to focus on the emoluments clause has diverted its resources away from other worthy causes, the ACLU is hoping to find a hotel or bed-and-breakfast owner that can prove he or she has lost business to one of Trump’s hotels during his presidency.

CREW’s lawsuit is just the latest development in what promises to be a continuing saga regarding Trump’s many conflicts of interest that began almost as soon as he won the presidency. Along with his unprecedented wealth, Trump brings to the office unique and gravely concerning entanglements that, whether he recognizes their effects or not, threaten to undermine his decision-making as president. The plan Trump and Dillon announced on January 11 would do very little to resolve the conflicts: It places control of his assets in the hands of his two adult sons and a longtime associate of their father’s with what so far amounts to a pinky-swear assurance that, despite their proximity to the president, they will not discuss any aspect of the business with him. On top of that, the plan supposedly would terminate several of the Trump Organization’s pending deals and place a ban on new foreign deals, two conditions undermined by the announcement that the organization would be moving forward with expanding its golf course in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Even before his most recent plan was laid out, Trump has attempted to deflect criticism by repeatedly asserting that the law barring executive-branch officials from maintaining financial holdings or business ties that overlap with their duties does not apply to the president or vice president. In this, he is correct; the law, passed in 1989, exempts the two chief executives from conflict-of-interest rules on the understanding that their purview is so broad that it would be impossible for them to completely disentangle themselves.

Regardless, legality does not imply propriety. Unless Trump acts to put actual distance between himself and his business ventures, these questions are likely to continue throughout his time in the Oval Office. On top of the aforementioned legal actions, the director of the Office of Government Ethics, Walter Shaub, has declared Trump’s efforts insufficient, remarking, “I don’t think divestiture is too high of a price to pay to be the president of the United States,” and a number of Senate Democrats have introduced legislation that would force Trump to divest or face impeachment. Below is an attempt to catalogue the more clear-cut examples of conflicts of interest that have emerged so far. The most recent entries appear at the top:

In January, The Guardian reported that President Donald Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, is looking to move forward with a multimillion dollar plan to expand its Aberdeen resort, including a new 450-room, five-star hotel and a second 18-hole golf course. Six months later, the project is creating an additional conflict of interest for the president as it puts his company at odds with Scottish regulators, who are concerned about the expansion’s impact on the surrounding environment.

When it was announced in January, the expansion drew criticism almost immediately, especially coming as it did only three days after the press conference at which Trump unveiled his half-hearted plan to resolve his conflicts of interest. At the conference, the president and one of his lawyers, Sheri Dillon, announced that the Trump Organization would cease pursuing new foreign investments. Additionally, though neither Trump nor Dillon articulated the promise at the event, a press release detailing the steps Trump would be taking also states that he has “directed the Trump Organization to terminate all pending deals—over 30 in number.”

A representative soon clarified the grounds on which the Trump Organization deemed the Aberdeen expansion permissible in light of these vows. She argued that “implementing future phasing of existing properties does not constitute a new transaction, so we intend to proceed.” In other words, plans for the expansion had been drawn up and agreed upon before Trump made his pledge; simply moving forward with the project does not, in their view, breach their commitments to avoid pursuing new foreign investments or moving forward on pending deals.

As with so many of the defenses of Trump’s behavior when it comes to conflicts of interest, the Trump Organization representative’s justification overlooks the actual concerns regarding conflicts of interest: that Trump’s relationship with the British government and other foreign-policy questions may be colored by his expectations of what a policy will do to his property values, for instance, or whether wealthy guests will pay for a stay in the interest of currying favor with him. Instead, the argument seems to hinge on revising the pledge to create a more vague, and therefore more permissive, stance. As Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics adviser for President George W. Bush, put it, the policy “clearly illustrates that around the world, he will just simply expand around the various holdings and as they continue to expand, the conflicts of interest expand.”

The expansion plans also demonstrate how the Trump Organization’s properties create the potential for the president’s business to come into conflict with foreign governments. As of July 28, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency has put the development of the Aberdeen property on hold due to concerns over how the golf course will handle groundwater conservation and sewage pollution. Scottish National Heritage, the government’s conservation agency, has also warned the Aberdeen council, the planning authority with jurisdiction over the resort, that the Trump Organization’s proposal doesn’t provide sufficient protection for the region’s dunes.

Though the Scottish government’s concerns appear to be genuine and unrelated to the property’s owner, its action exacerbates yet another situation in which Trump’s business interests could influence his relationship with a foreign government while he is president. Though he is not involved in the Trump Organization’s day-to-day operations, he still owns, profits from, and, according to his son Eric, receives periodic updates about the company. The knowledge that the Scottish government is holding up one of his investments could impact his dealings with the country (especially considering that, according to his disclosure documents, Trump has been losing money on the properties for years). With Scotland considering a second referendum on independence from the United Kingdom in the near future, the relationship between Scotland and the United States could become significantly more complicated, making it even more important that the U.S. be able to approach diplomacy without unnecessary distractions from the president’s business.

Moreover, the Scottish regulators’ decision suggests a template for how a less scrupulous government could attempt to use the president’s business interests to influence his behavior. Large real-estate ventures like golf courses, hotels, and office buildings are subject to all kinds of regulations, ranging from environmental considerations to zoning laws to workplace-safety standards. Officials in countries where the Trump Organization operates, or has plans to operate in the near future, could easily use such rules to attempt to strike political deals, explicitly or implicitly, with the president in exchange for allowing his businesses to continue to profit. Though this may not become a problem with Scotland specifically—the United Kingdom typically scores well with international ethics-watchdog groups like Transparency International—the president also owns or has his name on properties in countries with longer track records of corruption; in some, such as Azerbaijan and Indonesia, the specific partners with which the Trump Organization has worked have questionable track records. If such a group tried to use one of Trump’s moneymaking endeavors as a bargaining chip, the president’s business interests would come into conflict with his political responsibilities.

Though much of the focus on President Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest has gone to whether his hotels around the world violate the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, there is an additional clause that the president’s ownership of the Trump Organization may violate: the domestic emoluments clause, which holds that the president “shall not receive ... any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them,” aside from his official salary. Though Trump has renounced that official salary, there appear to be ways he could make money from sources through his business empire; for example, multiple federal agencies are renting space in Trump Tower in New York and other properties in order to keep the president and his family safe when they travel.

Now, two advocacy organizations, Free Speech for People and the Courage Campaign, are trying to bring attention to another potential violation of the domestic emoluments clause. The two groups are circulating petitions about public pension funds in several states, including California, New York, and Texas, that invest in CIM Fund III, a real-estate company that owns the Trump SoHo Hotel and Condominium in New York City. Though the details of most of the Trump Organization’s licensing agreements are private, the licensing deal for Trump SoHo, according to The New York Times, gives the Trump Organization equity in the property, meaning that the president’s company profits based on how well Trump SoHo performs. That means that the pension funds, which are drawn from mandatory deductions from the paychecks of more than 5 million public-sector employees across seven states, are therefore indirectly paying the Trump Organization to operate Trump SoHo.

These pension funds create a conflict of interest that corrupts the relationship between state and federal governments. Jed Shugerman, a law professor at Fordham University, says the domestic emoluments clause was written to avoid such a scenario:

The reason why the framers put the domestic emoluments clause in the Constitution is because they were concerned about the relationships of states vs. other states. Could big states, could rich states, wield more influence over the federal governments? One way that they worried rich states could wield more influence is by paying presidents directly. To avoid even the appearance of improper influence, they created a blanket rule: no emoluments from states.

So, the pension funds create exactly the possibility the framers feared. According to Reuters, California alone paid CIM $1,722,418 over the first three months of 2017, an unknown portion of which ended up in the pocket of the Trump Organization and, by extension, the president. Whether the states intend it or not, and whether Trump recognizes it or not, that financial relationship and the feelings of good will and reciprocity it may create could very well lead the president to favor one state or a collection of states over others—or to lash out if one of the states’ funds were to divest from a company linked to his business.

By now, the myriad ways President Donald Trump may have profited from his presidential campaign, and could further profit from a 2020 reelection bid, are well-established. Holding rallies, fundraisers, and other election-related events at his hotels generated both publicity and paying guests, flying around the country meant that the Secret Service paid the president’s company for seats on his private plane every time he traveled, and housing his campaign headquarters in Trump Tower—and nearly quintupling the rent after becoming the Republican Party’s official nominee—guaranteed that some portion of his campaign expenditures would go back into his own pocket.

Now that he’s taken office, Trump is profiting from other Republicans’ campaigns too. According to Buzzfeed, Republican Party financial-disclosure documents show at least $293,000 spent at Trump properties during the first half of 2017. While the majority of that sum came from Trump’s already-underway reelection bid, roughly $72,000 came from the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and fundraising groups affiliated with other elected GOP officials, including Republican congressmen. The overall spending represents a significant increase over the first half of 2016, during which the party and its affiliated committees spent roughly $100,000 at Trump-branded properties, almost all of which was related to Trump’s presidential bid.

The gap between last year and this one on individual expenditures is even more striking: According to Buzzfeed, only one member of Congress spent money at a Trump property in 2016, putting down $200 for food and drinks. In the first half of 2017, on the other hand, the fundraising committees for Congressmen Tom MacArthur, Dana Rohrabacher, and Bill Shuster spent $15,000, $11,000, and $7,000, respectively, for events held at golf clubs and hotels owned by the president and operated by his company. The Republican Governors Association (RGA), meanwhile, spent more than $400,000 to hold a two-day policy summit at the Trump National Doral Miami golf club in May of this year; in 2016, the RGA’s largest expense for an event venue was roughly $285,000 at the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay, California.

The fact that Trump is making money from other politicians’ campaigns threatens to undermine the relationship between the president and the legislative branch. While factors other than policy and legislative acumen often color interactions between members of different branches—they probably wouldn’t play as much golf together if interpersonal relationships didn’t matter—there has never before been a situation in which legislators were openly paying the president. The added financial component creates the new possibility that a congressperson may attempt to pay the president to influence his decision on a topic the congressperson finds important—if not explicitly, then by implicitly inspiring goodwill and an obligation to reciprocate. The longer the situation persists, the more likely it becomes that such payments would affect the president’s approach to policy.

Trump’s unprecedented willingness to attack members of his own party and the willingness of pro-Trump media to pile on compound this problem. The president has responded harshly toward Republican congresspeople whom he considers insufficiently supportive of his agenda, even going so far as to meet with their primary challengers, while a pro-Trump political action committee at one point purchased, then withdrew, campaign ads against a senator who was wavering on the Senate GOP’s health-care bill. And the alt-right website Breitbart, which was formerly run by Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, and has associated itself with Trump since he began his campaign, continually ascribes political failures to congressional leaders like Speaker of the House Paul Ryan rather than to Trump.

Those tendencies, and the recognition that Trump supporters don’t necessarily go along with the Republican Party, only reinforce the notion that GOP elected officials must tread carefully to retain the president’s support. As long as patronizing Trump’s businesses remains a plausible means of currying favor with the commander-in-chief, there will remain the unprecedented incentive for Republican Party officials to turn their relationship with the president into a financial one in the hope of gaining his support.

To many of President Donald Trump’s critics, his decision to turn Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate, into a “Southern White House” epitomizes the way he’s mixing his business interests with his duties as president. With each visit to the property, he boosts the resort’s visibility and may very well prompt more people to enroll as members in attempts to get a glimpse of the commander-in-chief. That the club doubled its initiation fees in January, from $100,000 to $200,000, only adds to the impression that Trump—or, at least his namesake company—is banking on his presidency as a means of boosting revenues. And without a publicly available guest list and no word on what security protocols are in place, the possibility that somebody could be using a club membership to gain access to the president has led Democratic members of Congress to draft a bill specifically to mandate better disclosure of the goings-on at the venue.

On Monday, July 18, the ethics watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, won a major victory on that front when the Department of Homeland Security agreed to provide CREW with Mar-a-Lago’s guest logs, starting in early September. CREW, which counts among its leadership ethics counsellors from the administrations of both Barack Obama and George W. Bush and is currently suing the Trump administration over multipleissuesrelated to the president’s conflicts of interest, announced that it would be publishing the lists as soon as it receives them. What exactly they will receive, however, remains unclear: The private club’s screening protocols appear to be significantly less strict than those at the White House, and Politico reported in March that the resort may not actually be keeping track of the comings and goings of its frequent guests.

The possibility that Mar-a-Lago may not even have visitor logs to provide comports with both the Trump administration and the Trump Organization’s poor records when it comes to transparency. The administration has, for instance, ceased to provide a guest list for the White House and challenged the Office of Government Ethics’s requests for information about Trump’s finances and those of the lobbyists he has brought into the government. The president’s company, meanwhile, has asserted that keeping track of foreign payments at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., which Trump and his lawyer Sheri Dillon pledged the company would do in January, would be “impractical ... and diminish the guest experience of our brand.”

Since May, Trump has largely shifted his weekend trips from Mar-a-Lago to his company’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. However, two stories from the months he spent frequenting his resort in Palm Beach, sometimes with high-profile diplomatic guests in tow, demonstrate the importance of making visitor logs public. In February, when Trump brought Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Florida, the trip made news in part because it resulted in an apparent breach of security protocol: When their dinner was interrupted by news of a North Korean nuclear-missile test, the two heads of state read over briefing materials by the light of cellphones, in full view of paying dinner guests, at least one of whom took pictures.

Besides the guest who posted his pictures on Facebook, it remains unknown who was in attendance that night and may have had access to the two leaders and their meeting. Indeed, posts to social media have served as the public’s best window into the president’s interactions with the public during his weekends at his property. Pictures and videos taken by paying guests showing the president golfing, hobnobbing with attendees at meals, and crashingparties have proven vital to attempts to keep track of Trump’s comings and goings. That footage reinforces the suggestion that paying to attend a Trump property offers a good chance to meet the president, in turn suggesting that doing so could create an opportunity to speak with him and influence his decisions.

Then, in April, as Trump prepared to return to Palm Beach with Chinese President Xi Jinping, The New York Times reported on a frequent Mar-a-Lago guest who could have created friction between Trump and Xi: the billionaire real-estate mogul Guo Wengui, an outspoken critic who has accused China’s ruling Communist Party of rampant corruption. Guo himself is no stranger to charges of corruption: He left China in 2008 amid allegations that he had exploited his ties with one of the country’s top security officials to enhance his businesses. Guo maintains that the reporter who implicated him in the scandal was the tool of a government plot to undermine him, and has in turn pointed the finger at multiple party officials he says have engaged in various forms of graft, although he’s pointedly stopped short of criticizing Xi. He also claims that the Chinese government has seized more than $17 billion of his assets since he left the country.

And, the Times says, Guo is a frequent attendee at Mar-a-Lago. In March, he tweeted a picture of himself with the resort’s managing director. It is unknown whether Guo attended Mar-a-Lago, or even was in Palm Beach, at the time of Trump’s meeting with Xi. Indeed, without a guest list, it may be hard to ever know who’s there at the same time as the president except via social-media posts. But Guo’s possible presence, and even the fact that Trump is—via the membership fees Guo is paying to his company—profiting from Guo, would have cast a shadow over the president’s meeting there with Xi. Trump’s relationship with his Chinese counterpart got off to a rocky start when, about a month after the election, Trump broke decades of protocol by calling the president of Taiwan, something no president has done since the 1970s. Given China’s harsh treatment of dissidents in the past, Trump’s holding a meeting with Xi at a club with Guo in attendance could be interpreted as another slight, intentional or not, toward the Chinese government and further undermine one of the world’s most important bilateral relationships.

The problem, then, is twofold: First, it’s that Trump directly profits from spending his weekends at Mar-a-Lago and bringing high-profile guests with him, although only he knows for certain the extent to which his visits to Florida are motivated by this. Second, by paying the president to be a member at the resort, Guo gains a chance at brushing shoulders with and possibly even influencing the president, although, again, only he knows if that’s his reason for doing so.

Guo is also far from the only Mar-a-Lago member who might have a stake in rubbing elbows with the president, nor is he the only controversial foreign oligarch with whom Trump has financial ties of some kind. As such, Guo is indicative of the larger problem with the president’s maintenance of his business interests, both in general and with regard to his estate in Palm Beach.

On Monday, the federal government announced that it would be expanding its H-2B temporary-visa program. Citing a lack of Americans willing and qualified to do seasonal, non-agricultural jobs, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) expanded the H-2B program to allow 15,000 additional foreign workers into the country for the summer to meet demand at such seasonal businesses as landscaping services, hotels, and amusement parks. The move roughly mirrors last year’s, when DHS allowed 13,382 workers to come in under the program, although it came later in the summer than usual because it took longer than usual for Congress to authorize the expansion.

Even though the decision came from the executive branch, it seems to be directly at odds with President Donald Trump’s well-known anti-immigrant stances. After spending the campaign arguing that immigrants were taking Americans’ jobs and calling for a wall along the border with Mexico, Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric has continued during his time in office. Though many of his proposals have faced obstacles that may prove insurmountable, he has, for instance, restricted H-1B visas for low-skilled immigrant laborers, and under DHS Secretary John Kelly, the government has significantly stepped up enforcement actions against illegal immigrants, including those previously protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Additionally, the expansion was announced on the first day of the White House’s “Made in America” Week, intended to promote American companies, workers, and products.

Though the allowance of more foreign workers may appear to conflict with Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, it clearly aligns with his business interests. The Trump Organization, which the president still owns, uses H-2B workers at many of its golf courses, hotels, and vineyards. According to CNN, the Trump Organization has received 1,024 H-2B visas since 2000 for workers at such properties as Mar-a-Lago and the Trump National Golf Club in Washington, D.C., along with other types of foreign visas. Mar-a-Lago in particular has benefited from temporary foreign labor: The property has requested at least 787 employment visas since 2006. The Trump Organization has continued to apply for temporary visas since Trump was elected president; for example, in December 2016, the Trump Vineyard Estates and Winery in Charlottesville, Virginia, applied for six additional H-2A visas to fit its seasonal demands, then added 23 more in February. And on July 20, only three days after the DHS announced it would be increasing the number of visas available, Mar-a-Lago and the nearby Trump National Golf Club together requested an additional 76 H-2B visas for cooks, servers, and housekeepers.

The Trump administration has justified the increase by asserting that many of the companies that will benefit “are at risk of suffering irreparable harm if they don’t get additional H-2B workers.” However, the Trump Organization’s own record seems to contradict this statement: Mar-a-Lago has requested hundreds of foreign visas, including 70 in 2015 alone, while reportedly rejecting 283 of 300 domestic applicants since 2010. This arguably affirms one of the major criticisms of the program, which holds that companies don’t always sufficiently attempt to fill open positions using domestic labor before applying for temporary foreign visas.

The Trump administration’s decision to expand the H-2B program is yet another example of a fairly conventional government action complicated by the president’s continued ownership of his real-estate empire. The debate about the role of immigrants in the U.S. economy means that the decision would likely have been controversial regardless of who was in office. However, that the president himself will likely financially benefit from the program means that it also raises the question of whether Trump and his administration are looking out for the needs of the country or the needs of the Trump Organization.

As the first (and, so far, only) Trump-branded property to open since the election, the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Vancouver has prompted significant scrutiny. When it opened just five days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, ethics experts questioned whether the property presented an opportunity for anyone to attempt to influence the president by booking a stay there—a suspicion that seemed to be confirmed when a pro-business lobbying group relocated a meeting from a diplomat’s house to the new hotel the day after it opened.

As with all of Trump’s foreign properties, the property arguably violates the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, which says that federal officials can’t receive “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” But the first known government expenditure at the Vancouver hotel came not from a foreign entity—it came from the State Department. According to documents obtained by The Washington Post, the State Department spent more than $15,000 to book 19 rooms at the new hotel when the president’s adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, and his younger daughter, Tiffany, visited the property for its grand opening in February.

While the Trump Organization both owns and operates some of its flagship properties in the United States, such as Trump Tower in New York, the hotel in Vancouver is one of many licensing deals through which third-party companies pay to operate their hotels under the Trump brand. Though the president’s name appears in large gold letters on the building’s facade, the property is actually owned and managed by a Canadian company called The Holborn Group, which is in turn owned by the Malaysian billionaire Joo Kim Tiah. And, because the Trump Organization is a privately held company, the actual structure of the deal remains unknown: Though Trump declared more than $5 million in revenue from the property on his most recent financial-disclosure forms, it’s unclear whether that sum represents a flat fee or a percent of the hotel’s revenue. However, Slatenoted that previous court filings show that some similar Trump properties operate on the latter model, suggesting that what Trump earns from the hotel hinges on its success.

If that is indeed the case, the State Department’s expenditures represent a conflict of interest for him. As I wrote in February, when the Secret Service spent more than $97,000 to accompany Eric Trump on a business trip to Uruguay, it’s first and foremost improper that the Trump Organization appears to be directly profiting from taxpayer money because of the increased security necessary when its leaders visit their holdings.

Moreover, the State Department’s expenditure arguably violates the Constitution’s domestic emoluments clause, which states that the president “shall not receive ... any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them” during his time in office aside from his official salary. Already, the Trump Organization is receiving taxpayer money from multiple federal agencies, including the Secret Service, which not only effectively subsidized Eric Trump’s business trip to Uruguay but also pays to accompany the president’s family on their private airplanes, and the Department of Defense, which CNN revealed in February would be renting space in Trump Tower. These expenditures raise the possibility that groups within the U.S. government as well as those outside of it may influence the president, intentionally or not, by patronizing his businesses. Because even small payments can change a person’s behavior, these payments may warm the president to one department over others, potentially shading his assessments of the advice and intelligence he receives from them.

Even if the Trump Organization doesn’t profit directly from the hotel’s success—that is, if the company makes a flat annual fee instead of a percentage of the property’s revenue—the State Department’s expenditure demonstrates the problems Trump’s continued intermingling of business and government continues to create. As of now, because Trump has disclosed only the minimum financial details he is required to by law, it's impossible to determine how exactly he makes money from properties like the hotel in Vancouver. That in turn makes it impossible to determine the precise nature of his conflict of interest—an epistemological problem that has arisen with several other business endeavors of his.

In February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Environmental Protection Agency to review the Obama administration’s Waters of the United States, or WOTUS, rule. The regulation, which was created in 2015 but was put on hold by a court later that year, aims to expand the federal government’s ability to apply anti-pollution statutes to a variety of bodies of water. This week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would be acting on the president’s order and rolling back the regulation.

When he first called upon the EPA to review WOTUS, Trump cited its economic cost, calling it “a disaster” and “a massive power grab” that was “putting people out of jobs by the hundreds of thousands” (a claim The Washington Postgave its lowest fact-checking rating). And while pro-business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce lauded the EPA’s decision, environmental groups criticized the move, arguing that WOTUS represented a significant step forward in protecting the drinking water of more than one-third of Americans.

The decision also appears to represent a conflict of interest for the president. Along with increasing federal oversight of large bodies of water, WOTUS would have expanded the EPA’s authority to include regulation of smaller streams and ponds. As such, some of the business benefits of rolling back the rule will redound to the golf industry, which has been a major opponent of the regulation since before it was signed in the summer of 2015. The Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, a 17,000-member lobby, spent $30,000 to fight WOTUS in the quarter it was finalized, arguing that the rule would make it excessively costly to maintain golf courses without running afoul of new regulations on water use and polluted runoff. According to the association’s chief executive officer, Rhett Evans, under an earlier, somewhat more expansive, version of the rule, golf courses “would find themselves economically burdened, if not unable to operate profitably.”

Trump, of course, owns 12 golf courses in the United States, all of which would likely be impacted by WOTUS, meaning that he has a significant financial stake in ensuring that it does not ultimately go into effect. And though the decision to fully scrap the regulation was technically made by the EPA and its chairman Scott Pruitt, it was ultimately Trump who called for its review in his February Executive Order—not to mention that he was the one who appointed the notoriously anti-regulation Pruitt in the first place.

The executive branch’s decision to scale back enforcement of WOTUS specifically and clean-water regulation in general is also an example of how Trump’s broader anti-regulatory agenda often overlaps with his personal financial interests. Through his first few months in office, Trump’s domestic agenda has involved chipping away at the regulations his predecessor put in place, following a self-imposed rule that federal agencies must cut two regulations for each they implement. This will likely frequently result in policy decisions that will at least tangentially benefit Trump; for example, many of the tax cuts that Trump seems to favor, such as repealing the estate tax, would reduce his own tax burden as well as those of others in his income bracket. The result is that it’s often difficult to separate Trump’s conflicts of interest from what very well may be a genuine pro-business, anti-regulatory agenda.

President Donald Trump’s international real-estate empire continues to grow. According to The Washington Post, two new Trump-branded buildings—one residential development and one office tower—will soon be going up in Gurgaon, a suburb of New Delhi, India, “known for rapacious development and poor planning.”

As with many of the company’s other international projects, the deals create new conflicts of interest as they bring the Trump Organization into contact with more investors, partners, and governments that may seek to influence the president’s decisions. The nature of the real-estate business means that the company and its international partners will have all sorts of interactions with local and national governments, ranging from acquiring permits for construction to health and safety inspections once a project is complete. That creates opportunities to attempt to curry favor withTrump, whether intentionally or not, by creating favorable conditions in which he can do business.

To complicate matters, these deals in India find Trump in partnerships with less-than-savory companies. The companies involved, IREO and M3M India, have both been frequent targets of anti-corruption actions by the Indian government, which is currently investigating the former for illegal land purchases and money laundering and the latter for bribing officials to speed along construction. And Gurgaon is widely seen as a hotbed of corruption, where poor citizens and small landowners are often pushed out by developers through bribery or bullying.

As has been the case with some of the Trump Organization’s other international projects—the tower in Baku, Azerbaijan, that The New Yorkerdeemed “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal” springs to mind, along with his ongoing developments in Indonesia—the company’s involvement with potentially corrupt officials and companies could create problems going forward. For instance, if someone found demonstrably illegal labor practices at the sites in Gurgaon, he or she could use that information to blackmail the president’s company and its owner (that is, the president himself) into pushing for a particular policy. And to reverse that example, Indian officials seeking a favorable outcome on an issue of international concern from the American government could, explicitly or implicitly, turn a blind eye to any ethical concerns in Gurgaon in return for the president’s good graces, which could end up creating unsafe conditions that hurt the laborers working on the building. Meanwhile, the developments’ investors—currently unknown for the deal with IREO, according to The Washington Post, as the money flowed through banks in Mauritius and Cyprus—have substantial leverage over the president that they could wield by cutting off the flow of funds to the projects.

On top of the concerns regarding the specific details of the projects, the developments in Gurgaon demonstrate how little the Trump Organization’s pledge not to pursue any new foreign deals, which the president announced shortly before taking office, actually means in practice. Technically speaking, the projects in Gurgaon aren’t new deals, as the Trump Organization agreed to the partnerships before Trump became president. However, at a press conference held in January, Trump and one of his lawyers, Sheri Dillon, announced not only that “no new foreign deals will be made whatsoever” but also that the Trump Organization had already terminated “all pending deals.” That these projects in India are moving forward regardless seems to demonstrate that the Trump Organization’s definition of “new foreign deals” is so narrow that the guidelines will do little to prevent the company from continuing to expand while Trump is in office, thus creating new conflicts of interest.

According to a report by ABC News, the Trump Organization is looking for a tax break for the Trump National Golf Club Westchester in Briarcliff Manor, New York. The company is attempting to halve its tax bill on the golf course by arguing that the tax assessor’s $15 million valuation of the property is twice what the course is actually worth. If the appeal succeeds, the Trump Organization could see the property taxes it owes on the 143-acre club reduced by as much as a quarter of a million dollars.

Contesting a tax assessor’s valuation of a property in the hopes of getting a tax break is a fairly common move for large property owners generally and the Trump Organization specifically. In 2016, after the town’s tax assessor valued the property at $15 million, the Trump Organization tried to assert that the course was only worth $1.35 million, but ultimately relented and paid the bill.

The difference this year is, of course, that the property’s owner is now president, which means that suddenly, Briarcliff Manor is one of many local governments that must weigh the consequences of how they deal with Trump’s businesses. It must decide if giving the Trump Organization a sweet deal is worth the loss in tax revenues, whether because doing so will create a positive affinity that could spill over into preferential treatment from the federal government or because not doing so would mean crossing the famously temperamental president and potentially facing consequences down the line.

The situation demonstrates how the president’s decision to hold onto his business while in office could have ramifications for everyday Americans. While Briarcliff Manor isn’t exactly struggling—according to the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, median household income for the town’s 6,300 adult residents is roughly $141,000, and the poverty rate of 4.3 percent is 10 points lower than the national level—the local government nevertheless relies in part on property taxes for funding. If the town does give the Trump National Golf Club the tax break it has requested, that would mean less money for the town’s schools, police department, and other civic services.

One of the questions underlying the ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russian officials is whether the president himself is in debt to the country’s government or state-run banks. Though Trump has insisted recently that he does not do business in Russia, that assertion conflicts with 20 years of his (and his sons’) statements to the contrary.

This weekend, The New York Timesreported on details that underline his past dealings in the country: On the night of the 2016 presidential election, the Russian government granted extensions to six expiring trademarks that Trump had received between 1996 and 2007. The trademarks cover branding for a variety of products, including one for Trump Vodka, which debuted in 2007 and folded shortly thereafter, and one for the name “Trump Tower,” for a real-estate deal that the president began exploring in 1996 but that ultimately fell through.

By all appearances, the renewals in November were fairly routine and don’t indicate that the Trump Organization has any actual plans for pursuing business opportunities in Russia in the near future. As was the case with the trademarks the company received in China in February, it’s likely that registering the Trump name is more defensive than anything else, a means of securing the name to ward off potential knockoffs or patent trolls, who in some cases register well-known brand names so that, should a corporation try to expand overseas, they will have to pay to wrest the trademark back.

Even if the renewals were a mere formality, they point to the ongoing complications the president’s decision to retain his business while in office creates. Trademarks certainly aren’t direct financial compensation, but they have distinct monetary value as a means of protecting a company’s business interests, especially for a corporation like the Trump Organization, which relies so heavily on its brand appeal that the Trump name is arguably among the family’s most valuable assets. That leaves open the possibility that the president may be inclined to think more highly of a country because it has recently helped his company by approving a trademark request—which in turn opens the possibility that a foreign government seeking to influence the president might seek to curry favor with him by expediting the process or granting trademarks they wouldn’t for a less important person.

Other trademarks that Trump has received in foreign countries since taking office are not only ethically questionable but arguably violate the Constitution. Though part of the ethics arrangement the president and his lawyer laid out before the inauguration was that the Trump Organization would cease pursuing new deals in foreign countries during Trump’s presidency, the company has continued to register trademarks around the world. China granted him not only the trademark on his name in February but also 38 others in March, on everything from hotels to insurance to escort services, followed by six more last week; his eldest daughter Ivanka, who serves as an adviser within the administration, has also received trademarks there since her father took office. Mexico, too, approved Trump trademarks in March. These developments, which all came about after Trump took office, arguably violate the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, which bars federal officials from “accept[ing] of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Moreover, as has frequently been the case with the Trump Organization’s dealings in recent months, the timing of the renewals The New York Times reported on raises additional questions about whether Russia may have been trying to influence the president. Since November 8, the Trump Organization has seen unexpected progress on projects in multiple countries, including not only China but also Argentina and Georgia, where long-stalled developments both began moving forward in November. Though it remains unclear whether any of these actions were specifically meant to influence Trump, the cumulative effect suggests that international offshoots of the Trump brand are benefiting from the Trump presidency.

Muchhasbeenwritten about how few high-level government positions President Donald Trump has filled compared to his predecessors; stillmore has been written about the unusual qualifications of those he has appointed. This week, the president named another appointee whose background doesn’t really comport with her new position: Lynne Patton, who will head the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Region II, which comprises New York and New Jersey.

Like Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, to whom she will soon report, Patton has little-to-no directly relevant background in urban planning or housing. According to the New York Daily News, which first reported Patton’s nomination on Thursday, though, Patton has plenty of experience with the Trumps. Patton’s LinkedIn account indicates that since 2009, she has planned and run events for the Trump Organization, including “various marketing projects, philanthropic events & golf tournaments.” From 2011 until January of this year, she was also the vice president of the now-defunct Eric Trump Foundation, which is currently under investigation by the attorney general of New York after a report in Forbesalleged that the family had used the foundation to siphon more than $1.2 billion in charitable donations to the Trump Organization.

Patton’s appointment once again demonstrates how Trump continues to mix his presidency with his business interests. In her new office, Patton will oversee the disbursement of billions of dollars in federal housing funds to the states in which the president’s company owns the most property. Though the Trump brand and federal housing would seem to occupy significantly different sectors, there’s actually significant overlap between the two. As was documented by The American Prospect in April, the Trump Organization has repeatedly benefited from federal funding; for example, Trump owns part of a low-income housing development in Brooklyn that has received numerous grants from HUD (and that the president once called “one of the best investments I ever made”). Trump even came into conflict with the agency over the property in 2007 when he attempted to sell his stake, only to have the transaction blocked. That he has chosen a loyal business associate to administer a position that will have oversight over his own company seems to indicate how, rather than putting the best interests of the American people above all else, the president can make decisions that stack the regulatory deck in his own favor.

Less than five months into President Donald Trump’s administration, Saudi Arabia has created a template for foreign governments looking to influence the president through his businesses. On Monday, TheDaily Callerreported that the country’s government spent nearly $270,000 on lodgings and catering at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., between November 2016 and February 2017. The expenditures were part of a lobbying campaign in which the Saudi government paid for U.S. veterans to travel to D.C. to advocate against the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. The law, which passed in September despite a veto from President Barack Obama, allows American citizens to sue foreign governments that allegedly sponsor terrorist attacks and organizations.

The payment clearly demonstrates the problems with the arrangements Trump has made to prevent ethics violations, which he and his lawyer Sheri Dillon described in January before he took office. Among other steps meant to resolve the president’s conflicts of interest, one measure was specifically designed to address concerns that foreign governments might attempt to influence Trump by paying to stay at his hotel in Washington, D.C. To head off such a possibility, Dillon saidin January, the Trump Organization would “voluntarily donate all profits from foreign government payments to his hotels to the United States Treasury.”

In the four months since the inauguration, the Trump Organization itself has demonstrated the insufficiency of this pledge on multiple occasions. First, in March, the company admitted that it hadn’t yet made the payments it had promised, and said it would not be doing so until the end of the calendar year. Then, in May, the organization sent Congress a pamphlet outlining the relatively meager steps it would take to uphold its commitment, stating that it wouldn’t actively attempt to identify foreign agents staying at the hotel because doing so would be “impractical.” Instead, the document suggested, the company would be relying on the foreign governments to identify themselves. After TheDaily Caller’s report, the Trump Organization announced that it would indeed be transferring profits from the Saudi payments to the Treasury at the end of the calendar year.

However, it’s unclear whether, under the Trump Organization’s guidelines, they would have done so if not for the attention the story received from the media. The Saudi government didn’t technically pay for the hotel rooms; instead, they paid the American lobbying firm Qorvis MSLGroup, which hired a subcontractor. Qorvis was then required to disclose the source of the funds to the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and a Daily Caller reporter then reported the story based on those disclosures. Given that the Trump Organization has effectively abdicated the responsibility of tracking payments that aren’t “direct billings from the Property to a foreign government,” it’s entirely possible that the company would not have done the due diligence required to follow the money; as it is, the story didn’t emerge for several months. Moreover, the Trump Organization still hasn’t answered the question of how it will determine what portion of the revenues constitute profits that it will pass along to the treasury.

Theoretically, the Trump Organization may have legitimately not been aware that the money Qorvis spent at the hotel came from the Saudi government, in which case Trump himself also wouldn’t have known about it, either. However, Saudi Arabia has hired Qorvis to carry out PR campaigns twice in the past, once shortly after 9/11 and once after the country invaded Yemen in 2015; both efforts were highly controversial, with the former resulting in a probe by the Justice Department in 2004. Besides, given that the Saudi government would likely have been spending that money on the campaign regardless, the mere possibility that the president would know where the payments came from and think more favorably of the country may very well have been enough of an incentive to make bookings at Trump’s hotel over its competition. Finally, even without the Saudi connection, the situation still constitutes an organization effectively paying the president while lobbying on a controversial issue.

It’s hardly hyperbolic to say that Saudi Arabia’s payment at the Trump International Hotel is exactly what ethics experts worried about when they first raised concerns about the president’s decision to retain ownership of his businesses while in office. As part of an active campaign to lobby the U.S. government, the Saudi government was effectively paying the president, who very well could end up significantly influencing how the policy plays out. In doing so, they demonstrated the inadequacy of Trump’s plan to avoid conflicts of interest: If the disclosure paperwork hadn’t surfaced, all it would have taken to skirt the rules Trump and his company set up was to funnel money through a lobbying firm.

During his first few months in office, President Donald Trump spent many of his weekends at Mar-a-Lago, which some have called his “Winter White House,” in Palm Beach, Florida. His trips there were subject to criticism on the grounds of both symbolism and substance. Symbolically, his visits both conflicted with his campaign promise to rarely leave Washington, D.C., and undermined his frequent criticisms of his predecessor for traveling while in office. Substantively, Trump’s trips to Mar-a-Lago make manifest one of the major problems with his decision to retain ownership of his businesses while in office: Anybody seeking to influence Trump could theoretically pay for a membership, putting money in his pocket while potentially gaining direct access to him. In this way, the president’s mere presence serves as an advertisement for the resort.

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Many of the same concerns apply to Trump’s “Summer White House,” his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. It’s historically been his summer getaway, and, given his penchant for visiting his own properties, it’s expected he will be spending more time there in coming months.

But whereas the problems with Mar-a-Lago have mainly been implicit—neither Trump nor his company, the Trump Organization, has acknowledged any link between the election and, say, the decision to double the club’s initiation fees in January—the intermingling of the presidency and the Trump Organization is on more explicit display in Bedminster. While there’s plenty of evidence (especially on social media) that visiting Mar-a-Lago could lead to an encounter with the president, Bedminster appears to have been actively advertising the possibility. According to Laura Holson of The New York Times, who toured the property with Trump’s son Eric,

Mr. Trump is a selling point for prospective brides and grooms considering holding their weddings at the club. When I was there, I was given a marketing brochure that made the following pledge: “If he is on-site for your big day, he will likely stop in & congratulate the happy couple. He may take some photos with you but we ask you and your guests to be respectful of his time & privacy.”

In a remarkable piece of advertising synergy, Trump made good on the promise in the brochure the weekend after Holson published her article. Between June 9 and June 11, Trump’s second weekend visiting the property since taking office, numerous photos posted on Instagram show the president posing for pictures with his paying guests at the resort, including not only a bride and groom but also a group of eighth-graders at their middle-school graduation party.

Though Holson notes that “a spokeswoman for the club said that the specific brochure has been discontinued,” the fact that it was present after Trump took office in the first place demonstrates the conflict of interest the resort creates. Trump himself has even acknowledged that his presence is a draw for the property: In November, shortly after the election, Trump told paying guests that he would be interviewing prospective members of his cabinet at the golf club and that members might be able to “come along” to the meetings.

Bedminster offers a prime opportunity for anybody with deep enough pockets—the initiation fee reportedly runs $350,000—to attempt to buy his or her way into a meeting with the president, a fact that marketers at the Trump Organization appear to have recognized. And scientific studies show that even minuscule financial transactions can be enough to significantly influence the recipient, meaning that, if and when such a meeting happens, the fact that such visitors are paying Trump to be there will almost certainly hang over the encounter—and make him more inclined to do something in return.

The situation demonstrates how Trump’s continual choice to shirk longstanding ethical procedures threatens to compromise his decisionmaking as president. As Trump himself has noted, the president is technically exempt from federal conflict-of-interest laws (although not, as has been frequently noted, the Constitution’s emoluments clause). But by retaining ownership of his businesses, Trump creates the exact situation those laws were designed to prevent: On issues both large and small, it’s an open question whether Trump is prioritizing the well-being of the country or whether he’s allowing his financial interests to dictate his behavior.

On the European leg of his first foreign trip, President Donald Trump elucidated the relationship between his business and his presidency, although in a way that only further complicates the already-difficult task of understanding how his financial interests might impact his decisions in office. According to the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, in a meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, Trump discussed his skepticism toward the European Union through the lens of his experiences as a real-estate mogul. Per a translation in The Guardian, an anonymous source told the paper, “Every time we talk about a country, [Trump] remembered the things he had done. Scotland? He said he opened a club. Ireland? He said it took him two and a half years to get a license and that did not give him a very good image of the European Union.”

His conversation with Michel, though, is different, for one key reason: Trump has no hotels in Belgium—and, unless his company is willing to violate a pledge meant to mitigate conflicts of interest, it won’t be pursuing deals there until Trump is out of office. That doesn’t definitively preclude the possibility that he meant to boost his businesses by venting to Michel, but it certainly reduces its likelihood.

What the conversation does do, though, is demonstrate how inextricable Trump’s businesses are from his behavior as president. It’s not just that Trump has ample knowledge of his holdings to act in his own financial interests and little reason to fear that a Republican-controlled Congress might try to stop him. It’s also that Trump seems to approach every issue with a mind toward how it’s impacted his company in the past—and how it will impact his company in the future. As the aforementioned anonymous source in Le Soirdescribed it, “One feels that he wants a system where everything can be realized very quickly and without formality”—a broad pro-business stance that would just so happen to make it significantly easier for the Trump Organization to operate in Europe as well.

As long as the president retains ownership of his company, it’s possible to impute the Trump Organization’s footprint in a variety of the administration’s policy stances. For instance, the notion that Trump favors leaders of countries where he has property is arguably the least concerning explanation for his affinity for noted authoritarians like Erdogan and Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte. On economic issues as well, the president has supported numerous policies over the years that would mainly help wealthy businesspeople in general and the Trump Organization in particular; for example, he’s in favor of weakening the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which would make it significantly easier for his company to move forward on deals in countries like Azerbaijan where bribery of public officials is more common than it is in the U.S. These questions of where genuine policy positions end and self-interest begins will continue—unless, of course, Trump does what ethics experts have urged him to do and actually sells his business.

President Donald Trump’s properties around the world bring with them business partners from around the world. Several of these ties have already come under scrutiny: A Trump-branded tower in Baku, Azerbaijan, put him in business with allegedly corrupt officials who are themselves connected with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, for example, while two properties in Indonesia link him to officials implicated in a bribery scandal and a racially-motivated attempt to oust a sitting governor.

Now, The Wall Street Journal has reported an additional source of a conflict of interest along these lines: Trump International Tower and Hotel in Toronto. According to the Journal, one of Trump’s partners in the project, Alexander Shnaider, received millions of dollars from the Russian bank Vnesheconombank, or VEB, shortly before investing in the project. Shnaider, who is Russian American and was the main developer on the Trump-branded property, sold his own company’s share in a Ukrainian steelmaker to VEB for $850 million in 2010. Shnaider’s lawyer said in April that $15 million from the sale went into the Toronto tower, although he walked back his statement the next day, writing that he is “not able to confirm that any funds” from the sale went into the project.

VEB is owned by the Russian government; according to its website, its mandate is “to enhance [the] competitiveness of the Russian economy, diversify it, and stimulate investment activity,” and the bank’s supervisory board is chaired by the country’s prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev. At the time of the deal with Shnaider’s company, though, its chairman was the current Russian President Vladimir Putin, who, according to a Russian government official and multiple experts, would have had to sign off on such an exchange.

As with many of Trump’s business holdings, the property represents a conflict of interest because it brings him revenue that’s made possible by money from a bank owned and operated by a foreign government. Though Trump doesn’t own the tower—he merely licenses his name to Shnaider, who owns the building through his company Talon International Development Inc.—the Trump Organization nevertheless profits off of the building and, by extension, from VEB’s deal with Shnaider. This potentially gives the Russian government leverage that it could use should it want to influence Trump’s policies. That means that the Trump Organization’s continued involvement with the tower may represent a violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which precludes elected officials from “accept[ing] of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

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The Journal’s report highlights the inadequacy of the financial disclosures the president has so far offered. Last week, Trump insisted that his company does not have business ties to Russian “persons or entities.” As my colleague David Graham wrote, the letter from Trump’s lawyers that Trump proffered on the subject last week “doesn’t define several key terms,” leaving open the possibility that one of Trump’s projects benefited from Russian funding through a pass-through corporation or another intermediary. VEB’s role in the financing of the Trump-branded property in Toronto is a perfect example: Because money from VEB went toward enriching Trump (through Shnaider), one can reasonably argue that Trump didn’t do enough to eliminate the conflict of interest that the hotel creates for him in office.

President Donald Trump has another property on the market: Le Château des Palmiers, his estate on the Caribbean island of St. Maarten. The president’s company bought the 11-bedroom beachfront compound in 2013, and the Trump Organization has been using it as a rental property ever since. It’s listed at $6,000 per night on TripAdvisor; according to specialty sites such as Luxury Retreats, which lists the price as between $6,000 and $20,000, and Mansion Global, which places the upper limit at $28,000, the price increases substantially during the winter, when the Caribbean offers an escape from cold weather. According to the disclosure forms Trump submitted to the Federal Election Commission (which remain the only public documentation of his finances), he derived between $100,001 and $1 million from the property in the year leading up to May 2016.

The asking price for Le Château des Palmiers remains unknown. The Trump Organization is selling the property through the real-estate agency and auction house Sotheby’s; according to the listing for the complex, the price is available only upon request. However, there are some clues available. On his FEC disclosure forms, Trump lists the property as worth between $5 million and $25 million, which does correspond with the $19.7 million he paid for it four years ago. According to Mansion Global, 7th Heaven, a real-estate brokerage in St. Maarten, has identified the asking price as $28 million, although 7th Heaven’s current page for the property lists the price as “PoA,” or Price on Application.

Though Trump no longer runs the Trump Organization, he still owns the company and, by extension, the property, meaning that he will profit from its sale. That means that Le Château des Palmiers offers yet another avenue by which somebody could attempt to influence the president’s decisions by putting a large sum of money in his pocket. It would even be possible for somebody to make an offer well above the currently unknown asking price to curry favor with him (and, possibly, through the artful use of a shell company, hide their identity).

As NPR noted, the Trump Organization’s decision to sell Le Château des Palmiers is “the first known major divestiture of a Trump property since he became president.” As such, it demonstrates the insufficiency of the steps the president has taken to eliminate his conflicts of interest. Trump has put the leadership of his company in the hands of his adult sons and a longtime Trump Organization executive with relatively few—and, based on Donald Jr. and Eric’s frequent presence at administration events and Eric’s statement that he will share some business-related data with his father, relatively permeable—barriers blinding him from knowledge of his financial interests.

Had Trump taken the measures suggested repeatedly by ethics experts on both sides of the political aisle, he would by now have put his assets in what’s called a blind trust, which would entail turning over his empire to a third party with whom he will have no contact, who would sell off the properties and reinvest the resulting money in other assets without providing the president any information about the sales or the purchases. Instead, Trump has set up a system under which, even if he does proceed to sell off his business, one property at a time, he will simply create new conflicts of interest as he takes payments from those who are purchasing the Trump Organization’s real estate.

President Donald Trump’s finances are infamously opaque. Since he has not followed the long-standing presidential custom of releasing his tax returns to the public, the only publicly available records of where he derives his income are his two filings with the Federal Elections Commission. Even those are difficult to parse: Much of his business empire comprises limited-liability companies (or LLCs), which face very few disclosure requirements, and shell and pass-through corporations, which can obscure ownership and make money trails harder to follow.

Much the same can be said for whoever has been buying up Trump Organization condominiums. A lengthy investigation published in USA Today found that, “since launching his White House bid, Trump’s companies have sold at least 58 units nationwide”—out of a total of more than 400 currently on the market—”for about $90 million. Almost half of those sold to LLCs.” One of those LLCs, a financial firm created shortly before the Republican National Convention named Milan Investment Limited, spent $3.1 million to buy 11 condominiums in the building the president co-owns in Las Vegas.

Normally, such a story would then identify who is behind the purchase and whether they may have some ulterior motive in buying something from the president. In this case, though, repeated efforts by the USA Today to ascertain who exactly is behind Milan apparently came up empty. The company’s headquarters in a strip mall the outskirts of Las Vegas are registered to two individuals named Jun Xu and Qi Huang; however, the reporters were unable to reach Xu and Huang through either their listed addresses and phone numbers or through business associates. A third individual associated with Milan, Chen Huang, also apparently could not be reached for comment, nor did the Trump Organization respond to inquiries about the identities of the buyers. The newspaper’s attempts to find the buyers of other Trump Organization condos met with mixed results: Though reporters were able to track down the real people behind some of the purchases, including a couple who said they bought the property because they’re fans of Trump’s, others proved just as elusive as whoever is behind Milan.

As the USA Today notes, the story highlights one of the major problems underlying Trump’s decision to retain his businesses while in office. There is no law requiring a shell company like Milan to disclose the identities of its owner(s) or the source of its money while purchasing real estate. The Trump Organization still owns hundreds of condominiums, the sales of which will directly profit it and, by extension, the president; this offers plenty of chances for any individual or corporation to purchase a unit to attempt to curry favor with Trump without having to disclose their own identity to the public.

So far, the Republican-controlled Congress has shown little interest in investigating the constitutionality of Trump’s decision to hold onto his businesses. That means that the only real disincentive for those attempting to influence the president by patronizing his businesses is the bad publicity that might ensue. But Milan Investment Limited’s secretive investment in Trump’s properties shows how easy it would be for an individual or a corporation to stay anonymous and avoid that scrutiny.

Metaphorically, at least, this isn’t unusual; the idea of the “permanent campaign,” a reference to how politicians consider their reelection chances from almost the moment they take office, has been around for decades. Such is the case for Trump, who filed a letter with the Federal Election Commission establishing his eligibility to run for a second term in 2020 just hours after taking the oath of office. Though the letter declares only that he can run, not necessarily that he will run, it gives broad coverage for the president to begin fundraising and holding campaign events, and to do so far earlier in his first term than have previous presidents.

Since doing so, Trump has held several events that, while officially presented as part of his “thank-you tour,” have seemed an awful lot like his campaign rallies. Meanwhile, between merchandise sales and an already-active fundraising effort, he has raised more than $7.1 million, and the Republican National Committee has raised an additional $23 million. That’s not necessarily noteworthy by itself; by this time, President Obama and the Democratic National Committee had raised $15 million. (Obama had not yet filed for eligibility in 2012 three months into his first term, although he had held events to promote his economic-stimulus package.) What does make Trump unusual is that he has already spent $6.3 million of his reelection campaign funds—and, according to reports he recently filed with the FEC, he is paying some of that money to his own personal businesses—for instance, renting space at his hotels or golfing on his courses—thereby literally profiting off of his permanent campaign.

This practice is nothing new for Trump. As early as 2000, he was speculating that he “could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it” by patronizing his own businesses and running the campaign out of one of his properties. During his 2016 bid, he did exactly that, establishing his political headquarters in Trump Tower (and quintupling the rent as soon as he became the Republican nominee and began drawing funds from the party rather than his personal war chest). Shortly before his victory, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s campaign had paid out the unprecedented sum of more than $14 million to his family and companies for such services as flights on his personal airplanes, rent at Trump Tower, and meals and hotel rooms at other Trump buildings.

Similarly, since taking office, Trump has profited off of the federal government’s newfound need to patronize his properties. Both the Secret Service and Department of Defense are renting out space in Trump Tower, for example, with the former believed to be paying at least $3 million per year to do so. This has led to rumblings that Trump may be violating the Constitution’s domestic emoluments clause, which holds that the president “shall not receive ... any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them,” beyond his official salary.

The amount Trump’s reelection campaign has spent at his businesses is comparatively small: According to The Wall Street Journal, more than 6 percent of the $6.3 million it’s spent so far, or almost $500,000, went to Trump’s hotels, golf courses, and restaurants. But that’s a higher rate than when his campaign money was going to his own businesses for the 2016 campaign ($14 million out of a total of $322 million, or about 4.3 percent). At his current rate, if he spends a similar amount over the next election cycle—and given that he’s already started spending, he could easily far outdo himself—he would be directing nearly $20 million to his own businesses.

On top of the arguable impropriety of personally profiting off of his donors’ and his party’s largesse, the situation presents perverse incentives for Trump. Already, elected officials, up to and including the president, to an extent base their behavior in office on what they believe will play well with voters rather than (or, in the best-case scenario, on top of) what is best for America. This is certainly true of Trump, whose every decision seems to prompt discussion of how it plays into the tension between his nationalist base and traditional Republican voters.

The personal financial benefits of campaigning mean that Trump has a little more motivation to delve into his reelection efforts than most politicians in his position. Because he is personally profiting, he has another reason to aim his politics toward his base so that they will continue donating to him and buying his merchandise in the downtime between election years. Moreover, rather than stockpile for 2020, he has an incentive to keep up the campaign rallies—and keep charging for them, as he did in 2016—so that he can continue funneling money from his donors and voters into his personal businesses.

Moreover, that the president is redirecting donors’ money into his own businesses only further highlights the inadequacy of the trust arrangement he has set up to supposedly prevent him from conflicts of interest. Trump and his lawyers have claimed that, by resigning from his positions within the Trump Organization and handing over control to his two adult sons and a long-time business associate, the president has distanced himself from his businesses enough that he will no longer be tempted to act in his own financial interests. Ethics experts (and common sense) immediately disagreed: Unless the president actually sells his businesses, many have said, and has the funds reinvested without his knowledge, he still knows more than enough about his sources of profit to put his own personal gain above that of the country. The almost $500,000 he’s channeled into the Trump Organization via his reelection campaign demonstrates this: Trump doesn’t need to be in charge of his businesses to know how to direct money their way; all he needs to know is where they are.

There may soon be more than one Trump Hotel in Washington D.C. According to The Washington Post, the Trump Organization is considering purchasing another property in the nation’s capital to develop for its recently created Scion brand, which aims to offer a more affordable alternative to the upscale properties bearing the president’s name.

Unlike the Trump International Hotel—the upscale property that opened in September 2016 and has become something of a synecdoche for the president’s conflicts of interest—a new Scion hotel in D.C. would likely be a licensing deal. That means that, rather than the Trump Organization owning and operating the property itself, a third-party hotelier will be paying the president’s company for the right to use the Scion name; candidates identified by the Post include Foxhall Partners, which has two properties in the city and a third under development, and the Beacon Hotel in downtown D.C.

But even if it isn’t actually owned or operated by the Trump Organization, the new hotel would likely attract scrutiny along the same lines as the Trump International. A licensing agreement means that the president will not be profiting off of the building directly; payments from individuals or organizations booking rooms or events there will not go straight to the Trump Organization, but to the hotelier. But Trump will still have a financial stake in the hotel’s viability: The longer it stays in business and the more successful it is, the more (and longer) the licensee will pay to use the Scion name, and the more likely other owners may be to commit to similar partnerships with the fledgling brand. Trump has resigned from his positions with the Trump Organization and transferred control of his assets to his two adult sons and a long-time business partner. But he still owns the company, which means he will still profit from his properties. According to his son Eric, the president will even continue to receive quarterly reports on how his real-estate empire is faring financially. The pathway to Trump’s pocketbook may be slightly more complicated, but it still exists.

The proposed new property also engenders some of the same concerns as the broader round of expansions the Trump Organization announced in February. Developing a hotel, even in an existing building, means working with local government bureaucracies, such as zoning offices that sign off on structural changes or licensing boards. In any city, this would create conflicting incentives for government officials who are suddenly being asked to rule on the president’s businesses. On the one hand, Washington, D.C., like many of the cities into which the Trump Organization is looking to expand, voted strongly against the president in the 2016 election; city officials, especially those elected by D.C.’s denizens, may feel a need to factor his unpopularity into their decisions with regard to the newly proposed hotel. On the other hand, the federal government still controls D.C.’s budget, placing additional pressure to green-light a proposal from the infamously mercurial commander-in-chief.

When it comes to President Donald Trump’s constellation of foreign investments, properties, and companies, much of the attention so far has been on his business’s apparent violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which bars officeholders from taking gifts from foreign leaders. According to numerous ethics experts, the clause takes an expansive definition of gifts, encompassing everything from a direct bribe to a foreign official’s approval of construction of a new Trump property. But some of the Trump Organization’s properties raise additional red flags due to the specific partners involved. That’s true in Indonesia, for example, where Trump’s affiliates have been involved in bribery scandals and radical Islamic nationalist parties, and Brazil, where the company pulled out of a branding agreement amid a criminal investigation of a local business partner.

Such is the case in Azerbaijan, which Transparency International ranks as among the most corrupt countries in the world, where the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Baku remains unopened. Though the long-stalled development has generated a steady drip of news and rumors for years, an overview by Adam Davidson in The New Yorker, entitled “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal,” puts into perspective just how convoluted the situation is, and just how much the project has led Trump and his company into a partnership with numerous corrupt officials in the Middle East. The details suggest that, on top of the continual underlying breach of the emoluments clause, the Trump Organization’s involvement may also violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA, which forbids American companies from participating, even unknowingly, in bribery schemes in other countries, with a penalty of up to $2 million and up to five years in jail.

According to Davidson, though the project originated in 2008 as a high-end apartment building, the Trump Organization has had a licensing deal with the building’s Azerbaijani developers to turn the property into a hotel since 2012. Though the Trump Organization presented the deal as a straightforward licensing agreement, it was in fact a much more involved agreement granting the company—specifically, Trump’s daughter Ivanka—extensive oversight over the project. Based on his FEC disclosures in 2016, which as of this moment remain the only official record of Trump’s finances, the president has so far made $2.8 million from the partnership.

But what makes this story unique among the dozens of ethical questions surrounding the president is the Trump Organization’s partners on the project. Ostensibly, the main developer behind the property is Anar Mammadov. He is in turn the son of Azerbaijan’s transportation minister Ziya Mammadov, who was once described in a leaked diplomatic cable as “notoriously corrupt even for Azerbaijan.” Also in on the deal, though not initially publicly disclosed, is Ziya’s brother Elton, who founded the company that currently owns the property in Baku while serving in Azerbaijan’s parliament. Then there’s the Mammadovs’ relationships with Iranian oligarchs. For years, the Mammadovs have been closely linked with the Darvishis, whose members include the head of a construction firm implicated in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s possibly illicit financial operations and the former leader of a company that was sanctioned by the United States for its role in Iran’s attempts to develop an arsenal of nuclear missiles. As the Mammadovs’ influence within Azerbaijan has begun to weaken in recent years, they have increased both their wealth and their mutually profitable relationship with the Darvishis, green-lighting a number of deals that will prove lucrative for both families.

Alan Garten, the chief legal officer for the Trump Organization, asserted to The New Yorker that, as the company has never worked directly with Ziya or Elton Mammadov, it has not engaged in any behavior that should trip ethical alarms. He has additionally claimed that the company did “extensive due diligence” in making the deal, which did not raise “any red flags,” although the actual employees who carried out the process are no longer with the company.

Still, merely by partnering with the Mammadov family, the Trump Organization may have violated the FCPA. The law explicitly covers cases in which an American company claims not to have known it was working with corrupt officials; jurisprudence since its 1977 passage has further expanded the law’s definition to include “conscious avoidance,” or active efforts by an American company to not learn of a foreign partner’s corruption. So though Garten claims that, since the Trump Organization did not have enough control over the project and has not itself engaged in bribery, its hands are essentially clean, experts on the law say that the Trump Organization may be legally liable if its foreign partners engaged in corrupt practices.

Adding to all this is the fact that Trump is on the record as opposing the FCPA in May 2012, right when it would have become relevant to his company’s engagement in Azerbaijan. Trump called the law “absolutely horrible” and argued that, since other countries do not have the same provision, American corporations are at a major disadvantage in which bribery is the norm. Trump’s appointee to the Securities and Exchange Commission (which enforces the statute), Jay Clayton, similarly considers the FCPA an obstacle to U.S. companies seeking to expand abroad. A dissenting voice on the topic is Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who stated in his confirmation hearings that he intends to continue enforcing the statute. Which of these voices will end up winning out on the topic remains an open question.

This, then, is the situation in which the Trump Organization—and, by extension, the president, who has stepped down from his position within the business but who retains ownership—finds itself in Azerbaijan: The company’s direct partner on Trump Tower Baku is the scion of a wealthy and notoriously corrupt family that appears to have only stepped up its self-dealing as its political power wanes. That family is engaged in what appears to be a relationship of mutual graft with Iranian oligarchs with deep connections to their country’s Revolutionary Guard, the ideological militia widely suspected by the international community of gross corruption and sponsoring terror at home and abroad.

These families can be added to the ever-growing list of international partners whose relationships with the Trump Organization could create conflicts of interest for the president. The Mammadovs’ arrangement with Trump’s company may not only violate the emoluments clause but could also feasibly put the president and his family in legal trouble should the SEC choose to actively pursue enforcement of the FCPA in Azerbaijan. And the Darvishis could in turn use their relationship to influence the Mammadovs, which could have significant implications should Trump attempt, as he has said he will, to take hard-line stances that could affect the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s activities. And if Trump so chooses, he could direct the Justice Department to curtail its enforcement of the FCPA or even use his bully pulpit to lead a legislative push to undo it, essentially condoning unethical behavior that in many countries enables leaders to personally profit at the expense of their own citizens—which, of course, could be a fair way to characterize the current situation with Trump’s business holdings.

With President Trump in office and still refusing to distance himself from his businesses, every new tenant in one of his buildings creates another possibility of a conflict of interest. Such is the case with Xiao Yan Chen, who also goes by Angela Chen, a business executive who, according to documents filed with the New York City Department of Finance, purchased a $15.8 million penthouse apartment at Trump Tower in New York on February 21. Chen’s transaction is the first notable real-estate deal involving one of Trump’s properties since the election, although it should be noted that she has lived in a different unit in Trump Tower since 2004. And though Trump has officially removed himself from the board of directors of Trump Park Avenue LLC, the corporation that runs Trump Tower, he remains the company’s owner, meaning that he profits from its dealings.

Chen’s purchase represents the exact kind of entanglement that has fueled concerns that Trump’s financial interests could influence his decision-making as president. Chen is the founder and managing director of Global Alliance Associates, a consulting firm that, according to its website, “facilitates the right strategic relationships with the most prominent public and private decision makers in China.” The firm is explicit about what it sells: access. Though the page listing its partnerships is currently empty, the firm’s “affiliates” page includes a number of international organizations promoting relationships between private corporations and the governments of the United States and China, including the USA-China Chamber of Commerce, the Asia Society, and the China Institute. Notably, Global Alliance Associates also consults for the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Trade & Development Agency, meaning that Trump is accepting money from the founder and managing director of a firm that works with the U.S. government.

Because Trump is holding onto his businesses, he has created a situation in which some of his earnings include money from the leader of a company whose sole goal is to help its clients curry favor with the Chinese government; it’s no stretch to believe that her move to Trump Tower and the money it puts in Trump’s pocket may help her gain access to the United States government. (Reached for comment by the New York Post, Chen said she was “not comfortable” discussing the purchase and its possible ramifications for her company.) Even if it wasn’t Chen’s intention, the transaction still could influence the president. As the president’s conflicts of interest continually accumulate, the likelihood that one or more will eventually impact his decision-making continually grows—as does the appearance that he is ethically compromised by the many people, organizations, and governments from which he is receiving money while in office.

As was true with the Aberdeen plans, the Trump Organization has provided a narrow justification under which it argues that the news does not violate its promise. Technically, it argues, the deal is not new: The Trump Organization has had a contract with Ricardo and Fernando Hazoury, the brothers who own the Cap Cana Resort in the Dominican Republic, since 2007. But the financial crisis and disagreements between the Trump family and the Hazoury brothers, which climaxed with Eric Trump accusing the pair of “textbook fraud” in a 2012 lawsuit, had stalled the arrangement for nearly a decade, and the two parties haven’t written a new contract since the 2007 deal was struck. Even other real-estate developers have said that the resumption of the relationship between the Trumps and Hazourys caught them by surprise. For their part, the Hazourys have said that the relationship with the Trumps “remains incredibly strong, especially with Eric, who has led this project since its conception.”

The development in the Dominican Republic epitomizes the way the Trump Organization seems intent to violate the spirit of their “no new foreign deals” pledge, and arguably even the letter. Asked about the Organization’s justification for the deal, Richard Painter, who served as the ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, noted that the company “can take the tiniest little past involvement in something and then extend it into an enormous new deal” and hasn’t presented a meaningful way “to distinguish between new business and old business.” Already, the Trump Organization has provided excuses for moving forward with two projects based on an interpretation of its own pledge that seems predicated on the idea that a deal can only be described as “new” if there had never been any relationship whatsoever between the Trump family and the property in question. As the company finds more explanations to broaden what initially seemed to be a clear-cut policy to reduce conflicts of interest—arguably, the only step in Trump’s plan that actually would have helped him do so—the pledge will likely become increasingly meaningless.

The Cap Cana story is yet another conflict of interest that only became public because of reporting from local media—and because of the nonchalance with which the Trump family handles the relationship between their business and the presidency. The first outlet to report on Eric’s trip was the Dominican newspaper Diario Libre, shortly after Cap Cana posted a picture of the Hazourys with Eric on its website. This follows stories like the president’s phone call with the president of Argentina and his company’s plans to expand into Taiwan, both of which were similarly broken by local newspapers before getting picked up by American press outlets. Further, like the president’s post-election meeting with business partners from India and Eric’s trip to Uruguay, the Trump family’s propensity for photo ops played a role: Even amid intensifying scrutiny of the Trump Organization’s actions, Eric seems unworried about having not only taken the trip but also taken pictures with his business partners.

The president’s putative pick for his ambassador to the Dominican Republic only adds to the perception that Trump will intermingle business and politics in the country. Trump has picked Robin Bernstein, a campaign donor, business partner, and founding member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, to be his administration’s representative in the country. Bernstein and her husband Richard have been in business with the president and his company for decades through The Americas Group, a consulting and marketing firm focused on construction projects in Latin America and the Caribbean. Choosing personal friends and supporters to be ambassadors is relatively common, especially in countries with which the United States has relatively uncomplicated relations. However, Trump’s decision to appoint somebody with whom he has long maintained a financial relationship—his second such appointment, after having named fellow billionaire real-estate developer and business partner Steven Roth to head his infrastructure program—suggests a continued willingness to blur the lines between his endeavors as a businessman and his duties as president, all while contributing to the perception that the president is willing to reward those who have done business with him in the past.

On February 15, President Trump scored a long-sought-after victory when a Chinese court ruled in his favor in a trademark dispute. In the case, which dragged on for more than a decade, the Trump Organization won sole rights to use the president’s name on products in the country, which would help prevent a bevy of unrelated entrepreneurs from applying it to a wide range of products, from toilets to clothing to condoms to explosives.

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Almost immediately, Trump’s critics pointed out that the ruling poses a clear conflict of interest. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California called the trademark decision “deeply troubling,” adding, “If this isn’t a violation of the emoluments clause, I don’t know what is.” Some, including Feinstein, went further in their assertions: Only days before, Trump had apparently reversed one of his stances toward China by offering a full-throated endorsement of the “One China Policy” (under which countries officially recognize the mainland Chinese government but not Taiwan), leading to the suggestion that the court’s decision was part of a quid-pro-quo deal between the two governments.

Whether or not the Chinese government tried to curry favor with the president by seeing to it that the court ruled in his favor, Trump’s newly awarded trademark poses a conflict of interest that could impact his future interactions with China. On top of the questions around his adherence, or lack thereof, to the One China Policy, Trump has taken a number of controversial stands when it comes to China, from accusing the country of currency manipulation to threatening to take hard-line trade positions that experts worry could lead to a trade war. Over all of these questions will loom the president’s knowledge that, with its trademark now secured, his company has an ongoing profitable relationship with the Chinese government—which, even if Trump does not proactively consider it in approaching the negotiating table, could provide his Chinese counterparts with leverage to influence the president’s decisions.

Of his first three weekends in office, President Donald Trump spent two of them away from Washington, D.C., at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. On his first trip to the resort, which he has dubbed his “Winter White House,” Trump spent time on the golf course, attended a ball held by the Red Cross—a federally chartered organization over which he will likely be tasked to wield authority while in office—and held a Super Bowl party at which he hobnobbed with wealthy patrons.

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His third weekend in office, Trump brought a guest of honor along with him: the prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe. After first meeting with Abe at the real White House, Trump took his Japanese counterpart to Florida for a weekend on the links. The biggest controversy out of the weekend was over the president’s handling of a situation that developed on Saturday, February 11: As news of a North Korean missile test broke during dinner, Trump and Abe discussed the situation in public, using light from phones of gathered onlookers to read briefing documents, an incredibly lax approach to information security, particularly ironic given that Trump won in part because of his opponent’s own lapses in information security.

The situation perfectly encapsulates the way the president’s business interests are coming up against those of the country. Already, the Trump Organization’s decision to double Mar-a-Lago’s initiation fees led to accusations of profiteering, premised on the notion that people would be willing to pony up in the hopes of earning an audience with the commander-in-chief.

The events of Saturday, February 11 took the problem to a whole new level. By discussing the recently obtained intelligence with Abe without leaving the table, the president committed a breach of international-security protocol in a very public setting. Even had the meeting been taking place in the White House, Trump’s lackadaisical approach to information security would have been cause for concern; for self-evident reasons, briefings on urgent security situations do not typically happen in somewhat open settings around civilians. But on the patio at Mar-a-Lago, the situation becomes much more dangerous, because the patio is not a secure setting, and the administration does not appear to have taken measures to make it one. This is a perfect example of a conflict of interest in practice: Trump has an incentive to host an event at Mar-a-Lago (personal financial gain) that runs directly counter to what would be best for the country’s security (hosting the event at the White House or an otherwise secure location). Not only that, part of the appeal of Mar-a-Lago is that guests will have a front-row ticket to see Trump at work. Previous presidents like Barack Obama, meanwhile, took a more conventional, and far more secure, approach, setting up a mobile security perimeter known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, to ensure that nobody in the area could look in on or overhear the president’s dealings.

According to the president’s Press Secretary Sean Spicer, Mar-a-Lago does, in fact, have a SCIF on site that they used for the remainder of the Trump’s conversation about North Korea with Abe. That they apparently began their discussion at the dinner table before deploying the SCIF underscores the problem of the situation at Mar-a-Lago: Trump has a financial incentive to hold an open-air meeting like Saturday night’s to keep up the appearance that, by paying to be a member of his exclusive club, anyone can have access to the most powerful man in the world.

Who could have been present? The club’s membership list is private, meaning that the American public has no way of knowing who was around to overhear the conversation. (Two Democratic senators, Tom Udall and Sheldon Whitehouse, have introduced a bill to change this fact, but there is little evidence suggesting it has any hopes of passing through the Republican-held Congress.) Nor have the Trump Organization and White House been forthcoming as to how they intend to screen club members and employees for security clearance; though Udall and Whitehouse reached out to the administration to ask how Mar-a-Lago vets guests for security risks, but received no response. In such a public place, and without protective measures like a SCIF, there may not be anything to stop an agent of a foreign government or other malicious actor from paying the $200,000 initiation fee to stay at the club, effectively paying to be near to the president when he receives sensitive information. Unless Trump takes significant steps either to erect barriers between himself and the guests at Mar-a-Lago—which he certainly didn’t do this time, and which could reduce his ability to profit from the property—there is a real possibility that he will continue to compromise his country’s interests when he travels to his resort in Palm Beach.

There is no reason to believe that DeAgazio had any intention of compromising international security with his pictures; he appears to simply be a wealthy Trump supporter who was excited at the chance to see his commander-in-chief in action and wanted photographs with which to remember the occasion. (He has since apparently either deleted his Facebook profile or increased his privacy settings so that it is no longer publicly accessible.) Nevertheless, he demonstrated just how Trump’s continued commingling of his business interests and his presidency places not just Americans but the entire global community in jeopardy.

In a way, the sheer enormity of the situation at Mar-a-Lago briefly crowded out the fact that merely bringing Abe to Mar-a-Lago demonstrates Trump’s conflicts of interest neatly. Though diplomatic meetings outside the White House are not unprecedented, Trump’s trip with Abe is likely the first instance of the president actually making money from such a meeting. Though Trump said that he was footing Abe’s bill, with both increased Secret Service presence and Abe’s retinue on hand, there’s a distinct possibility that, at some point in the weekend, somebody from the U.S. or Japanese government made a payment that ended up in Trump’s pocket. On top of that, the visit generated an inordinate amount of free publicity for Mar-a-Lago, which Trump repeatedlymentioned (and posted photos of) on his social media accounts and was continually noted in coverage of the weekend.

President Donald Trump’s most iconic property is about to get a new tenant: the Department of Defense. According to CNN, the Pentagon, hewing to a longstanding policy of establishing an offshoot headquarters near the president’s private, non-White House residence, is planning to lease space in Trump Tower in New York City to maintain close proximity to Trump should he choose to spend time there instead of Washington, D.C..

The Department of Defense’s decision is yet another example of how Trump’s decision to hold onto his business interests is rewriting norms surrounding the presidency and creating problems in what were once uncontroversial procedures. As mentioned above, the Department of Defense’s decision is not unique to Trump’s presidency: They took up residence in Chicago, for example, during Barack Obama’s two terms for the exact same reason.

The difference, as is true in so many of the stories surrounding Trump and his family’s conflicts of interest—the Red Cross’s decision to hold its annual ball at Mar-a-Lago, for example, or Eric Trump’s business trip to Uruguay—is that the president himself is now making money off of routine governmental functions. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Department of Defense is spending roughly $130,000 per month to stay at the property, although, according to the Journal, “a Pentagon official wrote in a letter seen by the Journal that the space is owned privately by someone unaffiliated with the Trump Organization and that the department sees no way in which Mr. Trump can benefit from the rent money.”

Nevertheless, the situation points to one of the possible ramifications of the president’s decision to hold onto his real-estate empire while in office. Trump’s protestations to the contrary aside, scientific evidence shows that the mere knowledge that one has profited from a relationship in the past often leads to preferential behavior. As a result, the fact that government agencies—if not the Department of Defense, then the Secret Service and the State Department—may be paying the president himself large sums of money to stay in Trump properties could have significant ramifications for how Trump’s White House operates.

Unlike a number of the events at Trump properties that have been featured in this list of Trump’s conflicts of interest, the Red Cross Ball, which celebrated the organization’s centennial anniversary, appears to have been scheduled before Trump even received the Republican nomination for president; a calendar listing on the website of the Coastal Star, a local newspaper covering events in the Palm Beach area, is recorded as having been placed in April 2016. Additionally, though the event has been held elsewhere in the past, this was not the first time it has taken place at Mar-a-Lago: Not only was last year’s ball held there, but the very first Red Cross Ball was hosted there by the property’s prior owner, the famous socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post.

Given all that, there is no indication that the decision to hold the event at Mar-a-Lago had anything to do with Trump’s election, and the fact that Trump will likely be attending the event is not unusual—President Barack Obama also attended as the honorary chairman of the organization while in office. Nevertheless, the ball perfectly encapsulates why Trump’s continued refusal to relinquish his business interests complicates even situations that would have taken place had he not become president.

Thanks in part to the makeup of the Red Cross’s leadership and its unique relationship with the federal government, the ball creates a particularly complicated situation. According to its website, the Red Cross “is not a federal agency, nor [does it] receive federal funding on a regular basis to carry out our services and programs,” instead relying on donations and fees for services like health-and-safety training courses. However, the organization operates under a federal charter as a “federal instrumentality … to carry out responsibilities delegated to [it] by the federal government.” The best-known of these duties include overseeing blood-donation drives and disaster-relief efforts; according to its website, it is also the Red Cross’s duty “to fulfill the provisions of the Geneva Convention” and “provide family communications and other forms of support to the U.S. military.” Further, the organization has a chairperson appointed by the president; currently, the chairwoman is Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2004. The charter also periodically comes before Congress for review and amendments to be signed into effect by the president.

On multiple occasions in recent years, the Red Cross has come under scrutiny for how it handles its multi-billion-dollar budget, most of which comprises donations from the American public. Prompted in part by reporting on the organization’s inadequate response to Hurricane Sandy, misleading statements about how it uses its money, and a September 2015 report by the Governmental Accountability Office, two congresspeople—one Democrat and one Republican—have independently introducedmeasures to increase the organization’s transparency. Neither has been enacted, but there will likely be another push to improve the relationship between the federal government and the Red Cross during Trump’s presidency, whether via a review of the Red Cross’s charter, the need to appoint a new chairperson, or the introduction of reform-minded legislation. If and when Trump is called upon to weigh in on these decisions, he will be asked to do so having directly profited from the organization while in office, which could limit his ability to act in the best interests of the American people.

One month before he took office, President Donald Trump managed to sidestep a potential conflict of interest at his hotel in Las Vegas. In the fall of 2015, several hundred employees at the city’s Trump International Hotel had voted to join the local branch of the Culinary Workers Union, only to find their efforts stalled by Trump and the hotel’s co-owner, Phil Ruffin. The case languished for more than a year until, after the National Labor Relations Board found Trump and Ruffin in violation of federal law, the workers successfully negotiated their first collectively-bargained contract. If this hadn’t been resolved, a conflict of interest would have arisen: The case would have gone to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, to which Trump will soon be able to appoint members.

As was true in Las Vegas, the push for unionization in D.C., if it’s met with resistance from the hotel, would create an opportunity for the president to place his own financial interests above those of the hotel’s workers. In Las Vegas, the dispute appears to have been resolved partly because of the NLRB’s intercession; if the Trump Organization similarly contests the case in D.C., the NLRB may once again be asked to weigh in. And now that Trump is president, he will be appointing new board members to fill two vacancies on the agency’s five-seat panel, which could very well tip it from its current left-leaning, labor-friendly composition to a more conservative, pro-owner bent. If, as in Las Vegas, the NLRB finds in favor of the workers, but the Trump Organization chooses to continue its opposition, there is a possibility that the case could come before a federal appeals court, where judges who Trump himself may have appointed will be asked to review the NLRB’s decision. And if the conflict continues even beyond the Court of Appeals, it will fall to the Supreme Court, to which Trump recently nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch, to render a final verdict. (It should be added that each appointee will be faced with the possibility of ruling against the financial interests of the infamously vindictive man to whom they owe their position.)

Appointing labor-unfriendly officials and justices might fairly be said to be in keeping with Trump’slonghistory of questionable labor practices, but this does not mean that the conflict-of-interest question will dissipate. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to determine how much his pro-business stances are dictated by a sincere belief in their efficacy rather than an understanding that he himself has benefited from them in the past and will likely continue to do so in the future. As such, Trump’s motivations will continue to occupy an ethical and legal gray area until he eliminates the overlap between his roles as a businessman and as president.

Of the measures that President Donald Trump and his lawyer Sheri Dillon laid out at his January 11 press conference to address conflicts of interest, only two actually ameliorate any of the concerns critics have raised: the cancellation of all of the Trump Organization’s pending deals and the promise not to pursue expansion in other countries (although developments since the announcement suggest that those pledges leave plenty of wiggle room). Conveniently left out of the plan, however, is any prohibition on expanding holdings within the United States—which is apparently something that Trump Hotels plans on doing while Trump is in office.

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On January 25, Bloomberg reported that Eric Danziger, the CEO of Trump Hotels, said after a panel discussion in Los Angeles that the company is considering tripling the number of Trump-branded properties within the U.S. According to Danziger, “There are 26 major metropolitan areas in the U.S., and we’re in five. I don’t see any reason that we couldn’t be in all of them eventually.” Danziger listed Dallas, Seattle, Denver, and San Francisco as among the cities where the Trump Organization is looking to build in the near future.

As the Trump Organization’s holdings expand, so too does the potential that business considerations will have undue effects on the president’s behavior in office, or at least appear to. Each location presents another opportunity for businesspeople or foreign dignitaries to choose to stay in a hotel in an attempt to burnish Trump’s opinion of them, their company, and/or their country. Each location increases the number of municipal governments with whom Trump will be interacting both as president and as the owner of a real-estate empire.

Trump Hotels’ expansion plans could put not only Trump but also the cities where new properties may be built in a difficult situation. San Francisco, for example, is currently experiencing a housing crisis, one possible solution to which would be to increase the pace of new home-construction projects, some of which could be funded by federal grants. On the one hand, it is almost certain that the residents of San Francisco, a city that voted against the president by roughly a 9-to-1 margin in November, would strenuously object to a new Trump-branded property in the city. But there is also an incentive for the city government to work with the Trump Organization in finding a suitable expansion plan. With plenty of evidence to suggest that collaborating with Trump’s businesses could influence the president, there’s added pressure for city officials to pursue a potentially costly project residents may otherwise not want in hopes of reaping the benefits down the road. Meanwhile, the officials in charge of doling out federal largesse such as housing grants may similarly feel pressure based on the knowledge that Trump’s feelings toward particular cities may change based on how receptive the locale was of his business’s expansion plans.

Finally, the Trump Organization’s announcement that it would be pursuing expansion further attests to just how little the president’s plan to mitigate his conflicts of interest actually accomplishes its goal. For the Trump Organization to not just expand but do so on such a large scale violates the professed spirit of the measures laid out on January 11 and defies any argument that the company will cease to act in a way that jeopardizes the president’s ability to do his job.

Less than a week into his administration, President Trump has a new property opening for business: the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Vancouver. According to The Washington Post, construction on the hotel finished shortly before Trump assumed office, with the building’s finishing touch—the president’s name spelled out in giant letters—revealed on January 19 (the day before the inauguration), and the first guests and permanent residents checking in on January 25.

As with many buildings bearing the president’s name, the new hotel in Vancouver is a licensing deal, with the Trump Organization leasing its branding to a third party—in this case, a real-estate company called the Holborn Group, which operates several luxury hotels throughout Canada. The Holborn Group is run by Joo Kim Tiah, the eldest son of one of the wealthiest families in Malaysia; several members of Tiah’s family are expected to fly in from Kuala Lumpur to attend the opening with the president’s two adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric.

The building is yet another manifestation of the running problem posed by Trump’s extensive foreign real-estate holdings. Unless the president actually rids himself of his financial stake in his company, every Trump property influences his incentives when it comes to making policy, foreign or domestic: Should he act in the manner that best serves the country, or the one that will protect his profits? Every building provides the opportunity for third parties to curry favor with the infamously capricious president: If he knows that he has taken money from somebody, be it a company, a private individual, or agents of a foreign government, that knowledge, and the goodwill it creates, is likely to color Trump’s decision-making. Moreover, every businessperson who has a licensing deal with Trump now has leverage: If Tiah, or any of the other businesspeople around the world with a Trump-branded property, disagrees with a decision the president makes, he can threaten to pull out of the partnership and jeopardize some of Trump’s cash-flow in an attempt to change his mind.

Hardly a day had passed between the new hotel in Vancouver opening for business and the first report of an organization choosing to host an event at the site, possibly for political reasons. On January 26, The Washington Post reported that The American Chamber of Commerce in Canada, a business organization affiliated with the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce, had scrapped longstanding plans to hold a meeting about trade relations at the home of a diplomatic official and would instead be booking space in the new Trump Hotel for the equivalent of roughly $1,900—a relatively small sum, to be sure, but even small sums have been shown to substantially influence decision making. The change initially prompted at least one planned speaker, the University of British Columbia professor Matilde Bombardini, to back out of the event; however, according to the Vancouver Sun, she has since changed her mind after being told that the change of location was due to a leak at the previous site.

As with so many of the instances chronicled here, the venue change demonstrates how Trump’s conflicts of interest often operate in shades of grey. If the Chamber of Commerce did make its decision solely based on logistics, booking a spot in a Trump-branded building still makes possible the appearance of paying for play. In a marked departure from the Chamber’s copacetic relationship with the Republican nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, the aggressively free-market, pro-trade group clashed with the presidenton multiple occasions during the 2016 campaign over Trump’s protectionist trade policies, but has already made public overtures since the election to reconcile with the president. If it did, in fact, choose to move the event even in part because of the giant name on the new location’s facade, the decision represents another chapter in the ongoing saga of the business community’s desire to both please and sway a president whose ideology is not that of a typical Republican. Additionally, though nearly all of Trump’s rhetoric about NAFTA centers on Mexico, Canada actually trades more with the U.S. than not just Mexico but any other country in the world. As such, there is plenty incentive for the Canadian branch of the American Chamber of Commerce to do whatever it can to reach out to Trump.

Though President Donald Trump has been a well-known figure in American public life for decades, perhaps the single biggest contributor to his stardom has been NBC’s The Apprentice. Trump himself is no longer the star of the show—former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken over as host in 2017—but the president remains an executive producer on the series for at least the coming year, including receiving a low five-figure salary for the position, according to Variety. Shortly after the news of that income broke, Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to Trump, clarified that he would be taking on his producing duties in his spare time, comparing the situation to previous presidents playing golf or pursuing other leisure activities.

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Norm Eisen and Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics lawyers under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, respectively, pointed out on NPR’s Fresh Air that Trump’s ongoing involvement with The Apprentice presents yet another conflict of interest. According to AdWeek, 11 companies, including the television-shopping network QVC and Carnival Company (which operates the eponymous cruise line), are providing on-air sponsorships for the newest season of The Apprentice; a twelfth, the Japanese motorcycle company Kawasaki, withdrew from a previously reported deal after customers threatened a boycott because of its sponsorship of the show. All of these companies—plus the numerous companies that run ads during the show’s commercial breaks—are effectively putting money into the pockets of the president, not to mention supporting one of his products.

Trump apparently believes himself immune to such conflicts of interest, both in terms of legal impunity and his ability to ignore them, despite a good deal of research indicating that even minuscule financial incentives (minuscule for a billionaire, that is) can be enough to significantly influence behavior. Additionally, there is little doubt that Trump cares deeply about the ongoing success of The Apprentice: The weekend after the new Schwarzenegger-led season debuted, the then president-elect took to Twitter to voice his thoughts on the new season’s ratings. So when one of the companies that sponsors the show interacts with the executive branch—as when Carnival reached a $40 million settlement with the U.S. government over pollution in the Atlantic Ocean, for example, or when QVC settled a $7.5 million suit regarding deceptive advertising in 2009—the question will necessarily arise how their contributions to Trump’s pocketbook and beloved TV show will affect the outcome.

Even if Trump were able to fully blind himself to the conflicts described above, the president’s role would remain a problem because it provides an unprecedented bargaining chip for both the companies currently sponsoring in the show and those that could seek to use it to attempt to manipulate the president. Consider, for a moment, the potential negotiations between one of Trump’s sponsors and a government agency that finds it in violation of federal regulations. That company, though, has a trump card the likes of which has never been seen in American politics: Should it become apparent that the case is going awry, they can threaten to pull their support of the president’s television show. The move would inevitably make waves on cable news of the kind that Trump has repeatedly demonstrated himself to be susceptible to. Any decision, whether in favor of the company or against it, immediately loses credibility: If the company is found guilty, the decision is easily framed as retaliatory, a vindictive manifestation of the president’s ego and narcissism; if the company is let off the hook, it will appear that the company has manipulated his venality for its own gain. A formerly uninvolved company facing federal investigation could essentially pull the same gambit in reverse: By publicly committing to sponsor The Apprentice, a company could create a situation in which any decision appears to reflect not the facts of the case but the sticky situation created by its involvement with the show. In this sense, then, Trump’s decision to stay on as executive producer, and the conflicts of interest the position creates, jeopardizes not only the president’s ability to carry out his job but also the fundamental legitimacy of the rule of law for any company that currently is or in the future may become involved with the show.

Additionally, the president’s continued involvement with the show creates a strange and tricky situation for NBC. Trump’s reputation is inextricably intertwined with that of the show, meaning that NBC will to some extent be caught between promoting Trump as a successful businessman and doing its journalistic work. The network will likely also be advertising The Apprentice during its other programs, not only through commercials but also possibly in-studio promotions on other shows, creating conflicting incentives for NBC journalists who will be trying simultaneously to talk about the Trump administration fairly while their own network markets one of his products.

The Dakota Access Pipeline, or DAPL, was the subject of continual controversy during the presidential campaign, drawing months of protests because of the perceived environmental impact it would create by crossing the Missouri River in close proximity to a Standing Rock Sioux reservation. Shortly before the election, the Army Corps of Engineers announced that it would be halting progress on the pipeline for further environmental review and to study potential routes that might avoid crossing both the river and Native American territory. On January 24, however, only four days after President Trump took office, he decided to move forward with both DAPL and the Keystone XL pipeline, which the Obama administration likewise blocked because of environmental and tribal-sovereignty concerns; the Army Corps of Engineers finalized the easement on the project on February 7. Trump has been vocally supportive of the pipelines for months, claiming that they would create new jobs in construction and the oil industry.

Trump’s FEC filings, which remain the only public record of his finances, suggest that he may have had an additional incentive to greenlight the projects: According to financial-disclosure forms he filed in June 2015 and May 2016, Trump has owned stock in Energy Transfer Partners, the company seeking to build DAPL. The stock was worth between $500,001 and $1,000,000 in 2015 and between $15,001 and $50,000 in 2016.

The president and one of his spokesmen, Jason Miller, have both stated, without offering evidence, that Trump’s stock-related conflicts of interest have been resolved. According to Trump and Miller, the president sold off his stocks in June of last year specifically to head off concerns that they may influence his decision-making in office. However, they have offered no meaningful evidence to back up their claims—evidence which, in this case, would likely be fairly easy to provide. They could, for example, offer more details on when exactly the stocks were sold beyond simply “back in June,” or explain why they did not mention the sale until December, just after the election, if the intention was to proactively address conflict-of-interest questions.

Given Trump’s penchant for dissembling about his personal finances and the lack of evidence that he has sold off his stocks, Trump’s decision to push ahead on DAPL and Keystone XL simply underscores the need for him to take larger, and more public, steps to distance himself from his financial interests. Moving forward with the pipelines is not the first instance of Trump making a significant decision that benefits a company whose stock is listed in his financial disclosures. For example, when Trump announced his intention to intervene at the factory of the air-conditioner manufacturer Carrier in Indianapolis, the Indianapolis Star noted that Trump’s filings list stock in Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies.

As has been noted on several previous occasions, one of the overarching questions about America’s first businessman presidency is just how President Trump’s vast empire willinteractwith federal agencies that answer to him. One of these potentially sticky situations became something of a flashpoint at the hearing for Dr. Ben Carson, Trump’s appointee to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development. At the hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren pressed Carson over the fact that, as the head of the department, he would be in charge of numerous programs that the president could manipulate to profit his real estate empire, asking Carson, “Can you assure me that not a single taxpayer dollar that you give out will financially benefit the president-elect or his family?” Though Carson did not respond to the question with regard to Trump specifically, he responded that he “will absolutely not play favorites for anyone” or act with an “intention to do anything to benefit any American, particularly.” (Warren went on to expound on how Trump’s lack of financial transparency makes it borderline impossible to know if a policy will benefit him.)

Warrens’s line of questioning was not entirely hypothetical: Trump does, in fact, own properties the maintenance of which falls under HUD’s purview. Thanks to an inheritance from his father, the president holds an ownership stake in—and has made millions from—Starrett City, a 153-acre, 5,881-unit low-income housing development in Brooklyn. The development, according to ABC News, receives substantial federal funding via HUD’s many programs designed to support low-income renters and homeowners. Trump could easily press for policies that would increase his profits from Starrett, most notably allowing for the sale of the complex, an action HUD blocked in 2007—and, potentially, to other properties from which he may profit in ways that, without more complete financial information, the American public may not even know.

The potential for a profitable relationship with HUD underscores a central problem with Trump’s refusal to fully divest from his holdings before entering office. It’s not just high-ranking officials who will possess the ability to act in a manner that benefits the president’s pocketbook—it’s ordinary civil servants as well. Shortly before his inauguration, The Washington Postnoted several additional ways employees in Trump’s executive branch could do so: Trademark disputes, for instance, will be adjudicated by judges appointed by his Commerce secretary, while the EPA could roll back environmental regulations that reduce profits at his golf courses.

Meanwhile, lower-level officials tasked with the day-to-day work of regulating Trump’s properties are likely to face pressure as well—if not explicit from superiors, then from the implicit, inescapable knowledge that enforcement decisions will impact the president personally. Federal Aviation Administration inspectors, for instance, are in charge of on-the-spot, random inspections of aircraft, including Trump’s, and at one point during the campaign grounded one of his planes after its registration expired; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration oversees construction sites, and has fined the Trump Organization on multiple occasions for workplace-safety violations. Only 10 years ago, politically motivated firings within the Justice Department became one of the many enduring scandals of George W. Bush’s administration; with so many executive-branch employees interacting with the president’s properties in so many different ways, some will inevitably face difficult decisions between proper enforcement at his expense or looking the other way to stay in the boss’s good graces.

President Trump’s promise to erect a big, beautiful wall between himself and his business lasted slightly more than 48 hours.

Almost exactly two days after the January 11 press conference at which Trump announced plans purported to disentangle himself from his namesake business, the Huffington Post reported that the president had scheduled a meeting with Steven Roth. Roth, a fellow New York-based billionaire real-estate developer, is in charge of Vornado Realty Trust, an investment firm that co-owns two of Trump’s most valuable properties, one in Manhattan and one in San Francisco, and served as an economic adviser during the campaign. What Trump and Roth discussed at their meeting remains unknown, nor is it clear when exactly the meeting was scheduled. Regardless, that the meeting came directly on the heels of the press conference at which Trump and his lawyer laid out a plan supposedly meant to resolve conflicts of interest, throws the reality of the problems that come from having a businessman as president—and one who seems completely uninterested in taking steps that would actually distance him from his business—into sharp relief.

Shortly thereafter, The Wall Street Journal reported that Roth may soon become involved with the Trump administration beyond just his pre-existing friendship and partnership with the president. Trump, it seems, will soon be naming Roth and Richard LeFrak, yet another New York-based billionaire real-estate developer, to oversee a council of 15 to 20 builders and engineers who will be carrying out the president’s $1 trillion infrastructure proposal, a situation which itself provides ripe opportunities for the pair to direct federal dollars toward projects from which they will financially benefit. This news comes on top of a December report in The Washington Post that Roth’s firm had put in a bid to rebuild the FBI’s headquarters, a deal that could be worth as much as $2 billion. In other words, Trump, mere days after promising to remove himself from his businesses, is instead ushering a longtime partner into his administration.

The move could also end up providing yet another avenue by which Trump could enrich himself in office and by which others could attempt to curry favor. Whether or not he intended to do so, the president’s decision to place Roth at the head of such a large pool of money sends a signal to other companies about the continued intermingling of his business and his presidency: that working with the Trump Organization can be a path to increased influence or even appointment. And though Trump claims that he will no longer be in involved in day-to-day operations, he will be actively profiting off from the company, meaning that he will be personally making money off of the attempts of others to gain influence over American public policy.

To begin with, through his Indonesian partner on the projects, the billionaire media mogul Hary Tanoesoedibjo (known in Indonesia as Hary Tanoe), Trump has forged relationships with several top Indonesian politicians. One such leader is Setya Novanto, the speaker of the country’s House of Representatives who temporarily lost his post for trying to extort $4 billion from the American mining company Freeport-McMoRan (a company which counts Carl Icahn, who will be serving as a special adviser in Trump’s administration, among its largest shareholders, and which has been frequently criticized by labor advocates and environmentalists). Trump had lunch with Novanto and several other Indonesian politicians during the campaign in September 2015 to discuss the Trump Organization’s planned expansion into Indonesia. At a post-luncheon press conference, Trump pulled Novanto in front of the cameras, calling him “an amazing man” and “one of the most powerful men” and asserting, “we will do great things for the United States.” (It is unclear exactly whom Trump meant when he used the word “we.”) Trump then asked Novanto to confirm that “they like me in Indonesia,” which Novanto did.

If Tanoe does so, it will create the possibility that Trump will be dealing with a head of state with whom he has shared business interests, which, as the ethics lawyer Richard Painter told The New York Times, “makes it impossible to conduct diplomacy in an evenhanded manner”—especially considering that, after Trump’s election, stock in Tanoe’s company rose significantly. Moreover, Tanoe, like Ahok, is both Christian and ethnically Chinese, which some insiders consider an obstacle to his electoral chances, although Tanoe argues that it is not Ahok’s religion but his lack of firm leadership that has led to the large-scale protests against the governor. Nevertheless, if Tanoe does choose to run for office, it is difficult to see how his race, religion, and business partnership with a president many see as blatantly Islamophobic could do anything other than create further difficulties both within Indonesia and in the country’s relationship with the U.S..

Tanoe remains close to Trump. He attended the inauguration as a guest of the Trump Organization; he and his wife posted several photos commemorating the occasion on their Instagram accounts, including pictures with Donald Jr. and Eric Trump and a video taken out the window of a car driving along the inaugural parade route. Then, in a February 7 interview with the Indonesian news magazine Tempo, Tanoe bragged about his access to the president. In the interview, he claimed to have seen Trump as recently as January 4 in New York, though he demurred when asked what they discussed, saying, “It wouldn’t be ethical, especially now that he is the president.” Tanoe also confirmed that “nothing has changed” regarding the branding deals in Indonesia, which he says will be moving forward with Trump’s sons in charge, a statement that would seem to contradict Trump and his lawyer’s January 11 announcement that the company would be suspending unfinished development projects.

Though the biggest controversy over the New Year’s Eve celebration at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate, was apparently whether or not Joe Scarborough could accurately be described as having “partied” there, video footage taken by a guest and obtained by CNN the next day brought renewed scrutiny to President Trump’s own presence at the event. During a 10-minute speech given in front of the party’s 800-odd attendees, Trump praised his Emirati business partner Hussain Sajwani and Sajwani’s family, saying, “The most beautiful people from Dubai are here tonight, and they’re seeing it and they love it.” CNN identifies Sajwani as a “billionaire developer in Dubai” who has “paid Trump millions of dollars to license the Trump name for golf courses in Dubai.” Trump’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, defended the remarks by clarifying that the president and Sajwani “had no formal meetings of professional discussions. Their interactions were social.”

Whether or not Hicks’s statement was true, Trump’s commendation of Sajwani is part of a pattern in which the president praises his business partners in ways that suggest he has little interest in extricating himself from his company’s interests. Previously, he has name-dropped business partners in Turkey and Argentina while on official calls with the countries’ leaders; he also met, and took photos, with associates from India shortly after the election. Moreover, as with several of the countries in which Trump-branded buildings are located, the United Arab Emirates has a questionable record on human rights; Human Rights Watch specifically states that the nation “uses its affluence to mask the government’s human-rights problems.”

Since footage of Trump’s shout-out emerged in early January, Sajwani has continued to feature in coverage of the president’s business entanglements. At the January press conference where Trump and his lawyer, Sheri Dillon, laid out the president’s plan to ostensibly avoid conflicts of interest, Trump said that after the election, Sajwani offered him a $2 billion deal, which Trump turned down. Rather than acknowledge that being offered billions of dollars from a foreign businessman constitutes a conflict of interest, Trump presented his decision not to accept as an example of his magnanimity, saying, “I didn’t have to turn it down, because as you know, I have a no-conflict situation because I’m president. It’s a nice thing to have, but I don’t want to take advantage of something.” Later, Sajwani attended Trump’s inauguration, although it’s unclear if he interacted with the president while there.

Then, on Tuesday, Sajwani posted a picture of himself eating with Donald Trump Jr. in Dubai on Instagram with a caption reading, “It was great having my dear friend and business partner Donald Trump Jr. over for lunch. Discussing new ideas and innovation always make [sic] our meetings even more interesting.”

Donald Jr.’s meeting with Sajwani prompts concerns about the president’s conflicts of interest, for two main reasons. First, the meeting offers a reminder of the insufficiency of the steps Trump has taken to distance himself from his businesses. Though Trump and Dillon claimed that their plan resolved questions about conflicts of interest, ethics experts disagree: Because Trump still knows what his assets are and the identities of those with whom he does business, they say, Trump still knows more than enough to favor his company. Moreover, in an actual blind trust, Trump would have turned his assets over to a trustee with whom he would have no contact. Instead, he turned it over to a long-time executive within the Trump Organization and his sons, who he has long counted as among his closest advisers and with whom he has remained in contact during his presidency so far. Donald Jr.’s meeting with Sajwani is a reminder of these inadequacies, especially because Sajwani posted the picture to Instagram, thus increasing the lunch’s visibility and, along with it, the likelihood that the president will know about the ongoing interactions between his company and Sajwani’s (that is, if Donald Jr. hasn’t already made his father aware of them).

Second, Sajwani’s caption further undermines one of the few parts of the arrangement that actually would have meaningfully reduced the president’s conflicts of interest. In January, Dillon said that the Trump Organization would be canceling all of its pending deals and would stop pursuing foreign deals during Trump’s presidency. Since then, numerous developments have called those intentions into question: Projects appear to be moving forward in both Scotland and the Dominican Republic, with the Trump Organization offering narrow, legalistic explanations as to why the progress didn’t violate the terms of the trust. Though a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization has said that Donald Jr. was not seeking new deals while in Dubai, the previous stories, coupled with Sajwani’s Instagram caption, undermine that account.

Among the dozens of properties President Trump owns is Trump Vineyard Estates and Winery in Charlottesville, Virginia, the source of his namesake wine. On December 23, the property requested temporary H-2A visas for six foreign workers, according to The Washington Post; on February 17, BuzzFeed reported an additional request that upped the total to 29. The visas, which are administered by the Citizenship and Immigration Services wing of the Department of Homeland Security, allow businesses to temporarily hire foreign, unskilled workers provided that the employer proves that there are not enough domestic candidates to fulfill a one-time or seasonal shortage and that the hiring will not depress wages for U.S.-born employees. Trump, of course, appointed the current Secretary of Homeland Security, which gives Trump authority over the very department responsible for deciding whether to grant the visas that the vineyard has requested. His choice for the position, the retired general John Kelly has a relatively scant track record when it comes to immigration, leaving open the question of how much influence Trump himself will have over the DHS’s policy on the matter.

On top of the fact that Trump will soon be able to influence the outcome of the request, that his organization has continued to request visas after his election underscores a tension in the president’s stance on immigration. From the moment that he announced that he would be running for president, Trump made antagonism toward immigration the central aspect of his campaign, arguing that both legal and illegal immigrants are taking jobs that should be filled by native-born Americans and depressing wages for others. Though he did not specifically single out the H-2B visa, the president has on multiple occasions spoken critically about the H-1B program, which enables employers to temporarily hire foreign workers for skilled jobs like those in the tech industry.

But the Trump Organization has long been a beneficiary of immigrant labor. For example, according to aReuters report from August 2015, nine companies of which Trump is the majority owner have requested at least 1,100 foreign visas since 2000. The majority of these requests were from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, which has requested at least 787 foreign visas since 2006, including 70 applications in 2015. (Meanwhile,The New York Times reported that, since 2010, only 17 of the nearly 300 domestic applicants for positions at the Mar-a-Lago have been hired.) The Trump Organization also famously may have benefited from illegal immigration: There is significant evidence that many of the Polish construction workers at the Trump Tower construction site in New York in 1980 were in the country illegally. In other words, Trump’s track record includes not just taking advantage of the very visa process he claims to abhor but also actually subverting existing law for his own profit. Now, by applying for visas for his vineyard, Trump is signaling that he expects that his business will continue to be able to profit from one of the very immigration programs he continually denounces.

On top of owning various properties and enterprises, Trump and his company employ roughly 34,000 people, according to an analysis by CNN. On December 21, several hundred of those workers resolved a labor dispute against the president—one in which, had it continued for even a few weeks more, Trump would have had the unprecedented power to make appointments to affect its outcome.

Here’s the situation: In October 2015, several hundred employees, primarily housekeeping staff, at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas voted to join the local branch of the Culinary Workers Union. Trump Ruffin Commercial LLC, which owns the hotel and is itself owned by Trump and the casino magnate Phil Ruffin, contested the vote, first by enlisting an anti-union consulting firm (for whose services it paid $500,000) and then by filing complaints with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Shortly before the election, the NLRB not only rejected Trump and Ruffin’s complaints but also found that, because the pair had refused to negotiate with the nascent union, they had violated federal law and their hotel was operating illegally. Trump and Ruffin have since appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

On December 21, more than a year after the hotel’s workers first voted to join the union, the workers announced that they arrived at their first collectively-bargained contract, achieved, according to an employee quoted in ThinkProgress, despite significant pressure from ownership that attempting to unionize would cost workers their jobs. According to the union, the new agreement “will provide the employees with annual wage increases, a pension, family health care, and job security” comparable to that of other Las Vegas hotels. Moreover, the Culinary Workers Union’s parent organization, UNITE HERE, has reached an agreement to represent workers at Trump’s recently-opened hotel in Washington, D.C..

Although this dispute has been resolved, it is included here because it exemplifies the type of situation in which Trump’s business interests are likely to overlap with his duties as president. Trump will be tasked with appointing members to fill current openings on the NLRB, the very body that ruled against him shortly before the election and will be tasked with resolving any future disputes between the hotel’s owners and its employees. Moreover, as Slate noted, the chief justice of the D.C. Court of Appeals is none other than Merrick Garland, whose nomination to the Supreme Court has spent months languishing in the Republican-controlled Congress and was withdrawn once Trump became president. Finally, if disputes of this nature go beyond the Court of Appeals, the case would go to the Supreme Court, to which Trump will be appointing a justice, which is expected to tip the balance decisively in a more conservative (and likely anti-union) direction. In other words, no matter how far up the chain future disputes of this nature go, Trump’s presidency will give him new power to influence the results.

According to an anonymous source and documents obtained by ThinkProgress, representatives from the Trump Organization pressured the ambassador of Kuwait to hold its embassy’s annual celebration of the country’s independence at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. The event, held annually on February 25, was originally scheduled to take place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown; the location was allegedly changed after members of the Trump Organization contacted the country’s ambassador. ThinkProgress’s source “described the decision as political,” suggesting that the embassy chose to relocate the event in an effort to curry favor with the president. The Kuwaiti ambassador has since disputed the report, telling The Washington Post that he had not been contacted by the Trump Organization and that the move “was solely done with the intention of providing our guests with a new venue.”

If ThinkProgress’s account is correct, Kuwait’s decision represents an escalation of a situation that has been developing since Trump’s election. The Trump International Hotel has been the subject of continual scrutiny for the conflict of interest it poses, in part because its lease explicitly bars elected officials from holding it, but mainly because Trump’s ownership of the hotel will almost definitely result in a violation of the emoluments clause, which prohibits the president from receiving payments from foreign powers—something that will arguably be happening any time a foreign government books a room at the hotel. Already, the hotel has begun advertising itself as a destination for diplomats and dignitaries, and the embassies of Azerbaijan and Bahrain have both scheduled events in the building. However, before the ThinkProgress report, there was no evidence that the Trump Organization had individually reached out to a foreign government in hopes of getting it to relocate an event to the hotel.

Unlike the president himself, those who are up for Trump’s cabinet, such as his proposed Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, will be legally obligated to divest from any holdings which may pose a conflict of interest. However, as The Washington Post noted, even selling off their holdings offers an opportunity for Trump’s cabinet members to enhance their fortunes. A federal program known as a “certificate of divestiture” allows executive-branch appointees and employees to avoid capital-gains taxes when selling their assets. The program has existed since 1989, and most recently received attention when President George W. Bush appointed Hank Paulson, then the chief executive of Goldman Sachs as his Treasury Secretary in 2006. Paulson was forced to sell off $700 million in shares of the bank; the certificate of divestiture enabled him to avoid a potential $200 million in capital-gains tax liability. According to The Washington Post, the Office of Government Ethics is currently researching whether the president himself would qualify for the tax break; even if he doesn’t, the unprecedented wealth of Trump’s cabinet promises to push this provision, and the financial incentives it creates, to the limit.

The paucity of information in the FEC filings makes it difficult to ascertain why his holdings appear to have decreased; regardless, the investment is not only one of several hundred but also a relatively minor one among Trump’s many holdings, some of which are worth over $5,000,000. As a result, it’s difficult to know how much, if at all, Trump may have considered the stock, particularly considering that he didn’t appear to remember his initial promise to save the Carrier plant. Additionally, Trump does not have stock in the next company he called out on Twitter, Rexnord Corporation (which is also based in Indiana), or its parent company, The Carlyle Group. Still, Trump’s deal with Carrier demonstrates the unprecedented challenge the president’s conflicts of interest create: Unless he either puts his holdings in a truly blind trust or divests completely, a significant number of the decisions he makes will involve some level of financial incentive for himself as well as for the country.

Almost as soon as Donald Trump and a lawyer from the Trump Organization unveiled their plans to distance the president from his businesses on January 11, many ethics experts argued that the proposal didn’t do nearly enough to ward off concerns that Trump’s business involvements would produce conflicts of interest during his presidency.

Under that plan, Trump resigned from the positions he held at the many companies that make up his real-estate empire, ceding control to his two adult sons and a longtime business associate, with his assets placed in a trust run by his two adult sons and Allen Weisselberg, a longtime Trump Organization executive, for the duration of his presidency. In unveiling the plan, the president vowed to refrain from talking about his financial interests with Donald Jr. and Eric Trump and said that all future business decisions would be reviewed by a newly appointed compliance officer to prevent even accidental impropriety. However, critics said, as long as Trump still profits from his businesses, these measures do almost nothing to mitigate worries about conflicts of interest. Besides, with so much of his fortune derived from highly visible real-estate and branding deals, some lawyers note that no trust would fully blind him from knowing where his financial interests lie; they say the only way to fully protect against conflicts of interest would have been for him to have sold off his businesses before taking office.

Then, when asked about the blind trust in a March 24 interview with Forbes, Eric gave answers that seemed to contradict not only the arrangement to which he supposedly agreed but also his own statements on the topic. “I do not talk about the government with him, and he does not talk about the business with us. That’s kind of a steadfast pact we made, and it’s something that we honor,” he said, before telling the interviewer that he will be providing updates to his father “on the bottom line, profitability reports and stuff like that” on a quarterly basis. “My father and I are very close. I talk to him a lot. We’re pretty inseparable,” he concluded. If Trump is in constant contact with Eric and receiving updates on his businesses from his sons, it renders the trust they created effectively meaningless—and validates the concerns watchdog groups raised when Trump first unveiled his plan in January.

After Eric Trump made those comments to Forbes, other holes in Trump’s plan have come to light. On April 3, ProPublica discovered a previously unreported change to the trust arrangement that effectively allows the president to personally withdraw money from his businesses at virtually any time he chooses. On February 10, a clause was apparently added to a letter outlining the details of the trust stating that “the Trustees shall distribute net income or principal to Donald J. Trump at his request, as the Trustees deem necessary for his maintenance, support or uninsured medical expenses, or as the Trustees otherwise deem appropriate.” In other words, Trump will be able to draw profits from his businesses at any time during his presidency as long as he and the trustees—again, his two sons and his long-time business partner—agree that it is “appropriate,” and will not have to disclose when he does so. This goes directly against the purpose of a blind trust, which in this case would be to distance Trump from his sources of income in an attempt to get rid of his incentive—or even ability—to consciously act in his own financial interest. So far, the plan unveiled in January appears to be as inadequate as many ethics experts had feared.

Finally, removing himself from day-to-day operations will do little to change the fact that Trump will retain substantive knowledge of the illiquid assets involved in his business, such as the numerous buildings and other products that bear his name, especially if he remains in frequent contact with his children. Even assuming that Trump does separate himself from any consideration of his holdings, his children will still likely be major players in the family’s organization, which will still bear at least the Trump name—arguably one of their most valuable properties, as much of the family’s wealth derives from licensing the name to third-party companies. Given the family’s oft-touted brand-consciousness (Ivanka, for example, briefly appeared to be distancing herself from the campaign, and several properties considered rebranding under the name “Scion” when it appeared Trump would lose), the situation epitomizes the way Trump’s, and his family’s, business interests may very well prove inextricable from his actions as president.

One of Mnuchin’s apparent beliefs is that the government should cede control of the mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the government acquired during the 2008 financial crisis. The two financial institutions’ stocks rose by more than 40 percent after Mnuchin stated that he believes the Trump administration “will get it done reasonably fast.”

When news first emerged that the president spoke on the phone with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen on December 2, the immediate reaction was uproar over his apparently impetuous breach of decades of U.S. protocol toward China and Taiwan. As my colleague David Graham explained, since 1979, the United States has participated in the “artful diplomatic fiction” of officially recognizing the mainland People’s Republic of China as the only legitimate Chinese government while maintaining loose, unofficial recognition of—and significant economic and military ties to—Taiwan. That Trump would speak to the president of Taiwan, especially before doing the same with Xi Jinping, the president of the PRC, flies in the face of a diplomatic tradition that has undergirded almost 40 years of U.S.-China relations.

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Amid the days of dissembling that followed the phone call, an additional worrisome detail came out: At the time, the Trump Organization was apparently exploring expansion into Taiwan. Soon afterwards, the Trump Organization denied that it planned to do so; however, even before the controversy arose, the mayor of Taoyuan, Taiwan, the municipality in which the Trump Organization allegedly wants to build, described in a televised interview a meeting with a representative of the Trump Organization in September to discuss prospective real-estate projects, and at least one Trump employee was found to have posted on Facebook that she was in Taiwan at the time on a business trip. Based on the January 11 announcement that the Trump Organization will be suspending its development plans and will not pursue foreign deals in office, it would appear that any movement on development in Taiwan is no longer on the table.

On this issue, though, whether or not voters care is immaterial to the central question. The president of the United States breached decades of international protocol created to preserve a precarious balance of power. That decision raised not only the possibility that Trump was blundering into a potential international incident but also that he may have done so in part out of consideration for his business prospects.

Though he often brags about leveraging corporate-finance law to become “The King of Debt,” Trump’s numerous bankruptcy filings have left most large Wall Street banks reticent to lend to him, according to The Wall Street Journal. Among the few exceptions is Deutsche Bank, which “has led or participated in loans of at least $2.5 billion” to the president since 1996, with at least another $1 billion in loan commitments to Trump-affiliated companies; more than $300 million of those loans have come since 2012.

Fears that Trump may unduly consider his indebtedness to Deutsche Bank in deciding his administration’s policy toward the financial sector go beyond general anxiety about deregulation. Deutsche Bank is undergoing a period of struggle that may have it on the verge of failure already. Its stock valuation has dropped by more than half since July 2015; in January, it posted its first full-year loss since 2008; and one of its many tranches of bonds—one specifically designed to be a high-risk, high-reward safety valve in times of trouble—has recently begun to crash. In June, the International Monetary Fund called Deutsche Bank “the most important net contributor to systemic risks” among globally important financial institutions. If the bank were to fail, it could have major consequences for not only Trump’s businesses, which would lose their sole remaining lender, but for the global economy as well.

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The first way Trump could monetize his own protective detail is by having family members travel in his two planes and three helicopters. This is not so much speculative as foregone: Over the course of the campaign, the Secret Service, which traditionally pays for its own travel during elections, spent $2.74 million to fly on a plane owned by one of Trump’s own companies. While in office, Trump will fly exclusively on Air Force One, while Mike Pence will be riding Air Force Two. However, their families may still be flying on Trump’s private planes—along with their protective details, which would effectively direct even more money to Trump. (Previous first families have flown with a detail, whose legal purview covers “the immediate family members,” but none have done so on planes they themselves own.)

This system creates an unusual set of conflicting interests for Trump regarding his own travel and residences. Though presidents as disparate as Dwight Eisenhower and Barack Obama have evoked partisan ire over time spent away from the White House, whether on the golf course or on vacation in Hawaii, only Donald Trump will actually have gained from his and his family’s travels. And if, while in office, Trump visits properties he owns other than Trump Tower—his buildings in other U.S. cities like Chicago and Miami, for example, or his golf course and resort in Scotland, or one of the many international hotels bearing his name—he stands to gain from the stays for which his security detail (and, by extension, taxpayers) may be paying. Moreover, the more his family members fly on his planes, whether they are running his business on his behalf or running interference with foreign leaders, the more the Secret Service will end up paying for seats alongside them.

In fact, there are already signs that the Trump Organization has no qualms about making money off of the New York tower’s new security arrangements in more ways than one. According to Politico, just five days after the election, a prominent New York real-estate firm invoked Trump Tower’s new secret-service detail as a selling point for a $2.1 million condominium, which it described as “The Best Value in the Most Secure Building in Manhattan.” Though the flier was issued by an outside agency, the president’s corporation still stands to benefit from increased traffic through processing and other service fees, making the advertisement a clear example of how Trump stands to benefit off of his new position.

Trump’s election has had the effect of speeding up development on a number of his branded properties, even when the president appears not to be pulling any strings himself. As occurred with Trump Tower Buenos Aires, the completion of an embattled Trump-branded building in the former Soviet republic of Georgia is no longer on hold now that Trump has won. The project, which has been in the works in the seaside resort city of Batumi since 2010, was initially scheduled to break ground in 2013, but has been in stasis for several reasons, possibly including the 2013 electoral defeat of President Mikheil Saakashvili, a friend of Trump’s and a supporter of the deal.

According to a report in The Washington Post, the green-lighting of the Trump property in Batumi has not been linked to a specific conversation with Georgian leaders, and a U.S.-based partner on the project has suggested that it has moved forward without any nudging from the government. However, numerous public statements in the days since suggest that Trump’s election was a major factor, including an interview with a real-estate entrepreneur who said, “Cutting the ribbon on a new Trump Tower in Georgia will be a symbol of victory for all of the free world.”

According to Trump and his lawyer, as of January 11, the Trump Organization has suspended ongoing development projects and will no longer pursue deals in foreign countries. As the project in Batumi falls under both categories, the statement suggests that progress on the president’s property in the city is no longer moving forward. Still, it’s alarming that a country like Georgia may be giving Trump’s businesses favorable treatment (whether he asked for it or not) in an attempt to influence his foreign policy.

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Thus, it was troubling news that when Erdogan phoned Trump shortly after the election—it was one of the first calls Trump received after his victory—Trump used the opportunity to plug his business partners in Istanbul. According to the Huffington Post, while on the line with Erdogan, Trump relayed praise for the leader from Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, whose father-in-law, Aydin Dogan, owns the holding company that operates the Trump Towers in Istanbul. Dogan has previously drawn Erdogan’s ire by criticizing the leader; in recent years, however, Dogan’s companies, most notably CNN Turk, have shown support for Erdogan’s regime, including broadcasting his first message after the uprising in July.

It’s worth noting that Trump himself considers his hotel in Istanbul a potential conflict of interest. In a December 2015 interview with Stephen Bannon, at the time the chairman of Breitbart News, Trump said as much, telling Bannon, “I have a little conflict of interest ‘cause I have a major, major building in Istanbul. It’s a tremendously successful job.” That he chose to discuss the towers with Erdogan, albeit obliquely, through his references to his business partners when he has already acknowledged the impropriety of doing so simply reinforces the perception that he may prove unable to separate his business from his official duties while in office.

The White House is not the only new Trump property in Washington, D.C.; there’s also the new Trump International Hotel, which opened in October and is located just a few blocks away in what was formerly known as the Old Post Office Pavilion. Previously, the hotel played a role in the campaign as the site of the event at which Trump recanted (sort of) his belief that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Now, the hotel is at the center of speculation as a symbol of how inextricable Trump’s presidential role may be from his personal interests.

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First and foremost, since his election, ethics groups and critics of the president have repeatedly alleged that, simply by taking office, Trump has been in continual violation of the lease he holds on the Old Post Office, the government-owned building the Trump International Hotel inhabits. At issue is a clause in the lease stating that “no ... elected official of the Government of the United States shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom.” As such, watchdog organizations such as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have repeatedly appealed to the Government Services Administration, the federal agency that administers the lease, to terminate the agreement with the Trump Organization.

On March 23, however, the GSA released a letter finding that Trump “is in full compliance” with the lease. According to Kevin Terry, the contract officer who oversaw the initial negotiations between the government and Trump, the president’s plan to turn over his businesses to his two adult sons and the long-time Trump Organization executive Alen Garten is sufficient to meet the terms of the agreement, as Trump is no longer “an officer, director, manager, employee, or other official in any of the entities” involved in operating the hotel. The letter immediately drew outcry from ethics organizations like CREW, which called the ruling “a disappointment” that failed to address the underlying problems of Trump’s businesses, and the left-leaning advocacy group Public Citizen, which described it as “an affront to the rule of law” based on “tortured and wholly uncompelling analysis” that “would get a first-year law student kicked out of law school.”

The GSA’s decision may also prove a blow to the more general argument that Trump has not done enough to distance himself from his namesake organization. Critics have strenuously objected to the plan Trump and his lawyer Sheri Dillon laid out on January 11 to mitigate conflicts of interest, under which the president has stepped down from, but retains ownership of, his numerous business interests, and placed his assets in a trust to be administered by his adult sons and Garten. His opponents maintain that, because Trump still has significant knowledge of his business interests and will still be benefiting from them, and because he has put in place few real barriers between himself and his sons, there is still ample opportunity for outside actors to seek to influence the president’s decisions by patronizing his companies. Though the letter from the GSA discusses only the Trump International Hotel and not the legality of the overall arrangement, it is nonetheless a decidedly favorable outcome for Trump in the first legal challenge over his conflicts of interest.

As if its location didn’t pose enough of an ethical question, the hotel has already hosted at least one promotional event specifically aimed at enticing foreign diplomats to stay at the establishment while in town on official state business. On the one hand, direct influence will likely be difficult to prove: The establishment is, after all, a five-star hotel that would have been likely to attract high-class clientele even if Trump had lost the election, a fact to which Trump and those who surround him may well point in order to maintain a patina of respectability around their dealings. Still, the meeting’s proximity to the election reinforces that it will be worth watching the comings and goings at the hotel closely for signs that Trump, who so often accused his opponent (often without evidence) of pay-for-play, may be using his position as president to promote his businesses.

Trump himself acknowledged that his presidency is likely to increase traffic to his Washington, D.C. property. Speaking to The New York Times, the president noted that the property is “probably a more valuable asset than it was before” and that his brand is “hotter” since the election. However, he went on to insist that there was nothing even potentially problematic about his unprecedented situation and that he sees no reason why he couldn’t run both the presidency and his business without conflict.

Nor did the string of bookings by international entities end after Trump’s inauguration: On February 9, Politicoreported that a lobbying group with connections to the government of Saudi Arabia had booked a four-day stay at the hotel in Washington, D.C. And on March 13, The Daily Callerreported that the Turkish-American Business Council will be co-hosting its annual conference at the Trump International Hotel after a seven-year runat the Ritz-Carlton. The latter announcement is especially notable because the organization’s chairman, Ekim Alptekin, is involved in another of the Trump administration’s scandals: One of Alptekin’s companies, the apparent shell company Inovo BV, paid $530,000 to the former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to lobby on behalf of the Turkish government, which prompted Flynn to register as a foreign agent shortly after he was ousted from the Trump administration for lying about his contacts with Russian agents while a member of the president’s transition team.

According to a report by the prominent Argentine journalist Jorge Lanata, the president’s first phone call with his Argentine counterpart Mauricio Macri included a discussion of the permit issues currently holding up construction of a new Trump-branded office building in Buenos Aires. Both Macri and Trump quickly denied the report; according to a statement from the Embassy of Argentina, “The subject both leaders talked about was the institutional relationship, and they briefly mentioned the personal relationship they have had for years.”

As summarized in a tweetstorm here, Trump’s relationship with Argentina’s government and business elites—and the story so far on his property there—is already long and convoluted. The phone call with Macri was apparently set up through Felipe Yaryura, one of Trump’s longtime associates whose company, YY Development Group, is in charge of Trump Tower Buenos Aires. The day after the phone call, the PanAm Postreported that YY Development Group had been approved to break ground in June 2017; evidence has since emerged that the permitting process is not, in fact, finished, although Trump’s business associates are moving ahead as though it is.

Based on the information at the president’s January 11 press conference, it appears that the properties in Argentina, as both ongoing development projects and deals in a foreign country, is no longer moving forward. Nevertheless, the questionable circumstances under which it did so in the immediate aftermath of the election demonstrates just how many avenues there are for Trump’s conflicts of interest to interfere with governance around the world.

Even as Trump was running for president, his company was continuing to operate and open new properties. While the most memorable openings may have been that of his hotel in Washington, D.C., and his golf course in Turnberry, Scotland, the Trump Organization was continuing to work on projects in other countries, including, according to a report the Washington Post, registering eight new companies in Saudi Arabia during the 16-month campaign.

The organization’s endeavors in Saudi Arabia are notable not only because they may further complicate the shaky relationship between the U.S. and an oil-rich gulf state notorious for human-rights abuses but also because of how they relate to Trump’s campaign rhetoric. One of his criticisms of Hillary Clinton was that her charitable foundation had accepted donations from governments with questionable records on human rights, most notably Qatar and Saudi Arabia, always with the implication (or direct accusation) that they were doing so to curry favor with Clinton when she was secretary of state. That Trump was continuing to level this criticism while his namesake organization was actively pursuing new projects in Saudi Arabia not only bodes ill for his ability to separate his personal and presidential interests but also further calls into question the honesty and transparency of his campaign.

As he indicated when he stopped there during the campaign, President Trump takes enormous pride in his recently opened golf course in Turnberry, Scotland. The day after the British public voted for Brexit—over intense Scottish opposition—Trump spoke at the property’s opening, proudly touting how the decision’s deflationary effect on the pound would benefit his business.

However, Trump also has a second golf course in Aberdeen, where it appears Trump has attempted to intercede in the interest of his own pocketbook.* According to The New York Times, Trump had a post-election meeting with Nigel Farage in which he “encouraged Mr. Farage and his entourage to oppose the kind of offshore wind farms that Mr. Trump believes will mar the pristine view from one of his two Scottish golf courses.” Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for the president, denied that the two had discussed the subject, only for Trump to later confirm that the topic had, in fact, come up in their conversation.

* This entry originally misstated that Trump intervened at Turnberry, his other golf course in Scotland. We regret the error.

It didn’t take long after the election for President Trump to be seen in public with international business partners. According to a November 19 article in The New York Times, Trump took a break from his transition schedule to meet with three Indian real-estate executives who are currently building a Trump-branded apartment complex in Mumbai. According to both Trump and the Indian businessmen, the meeting was essentially congratulatory in nature; a picture posted by one of the executives on Twitter shows the four men smiling broadly and giving a thumbs-up to the camera. However, that the meeting happened in the first place suggests that Trump does not currently have any qualms about forestalling official state business for personal business.

On top of that, the meeting raises questions in the blind-trust realm as well. The president himself was not the only member of his family there; two Facebook photos show that Ivanka and Eric Trump both attended the meeting as well. Their presence serves as a reminder that their father seems so far uninterested in maintaining even the nominal separation between himself and his assets that he repeatedly said he would create during the campaign.

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Duterte’s affinity for Trump apparently goes beyond vulgar word choice. Late in October, Duterte appointed a longtime business associate of Trump’s as a special envoy to the United States, an announcement that became public shortly after the election. This appointment in particular raises questions because it is just as open to exploitation by Duterte as it is to Trump, as the Filipino president could intend to use his new envoy’s relationship with Trump to strengthen the Philippines’ hand. Whichever side the appointment does eventually benefit, however, the situation is nevertheless fraught with conflicts between the three men’s personal and political interests.

LONDON — British outsourcing giant Serco has won a 39.1-million-euro contract ($46 million) to provide a range of scientific and engineering services to the European Space Agency over the next three years.

The contract is a continuation of a previous cooperation between ESA and Serco and could be extended up to five years, which would increase its total value to 66 million euros, Serco spokesman Adam Williams said.

According to Williams, 120 full-time equivalent employees will work on the contract, which includes key ESA projects such as Europe’s global navigation satellite system Galileo, support of the Mars Express orbiter, as well as participation on the BepiColombo Mercury exploration mission.

“We have supported ESA for many years and this award is testament to the skills and commitment our experts have demonstrated, as well as our ability to meet complex requirements across multiple countries,” Michael Alner, Managing Director, Serco Europe, said in a statement.

Serco will work with ESA in nine of the space agency’s 22 member states. The work falls under the responsibility of eight ESA directorates including Human Spaceflight and Robotic Exploration; Space Transportation; Navigation, and Earth Observation.

According to Williams, the competition was open to all companies and consortia excluding large system integrators such as Airbus Defence and Space. Williams further said the agency “awarded a number of frame contracts with different consortia having access to different combinations of services or manpower allocation in different activity domains.

An ESA representative was not available to comment.

Serco, sometimes dubbed “the biggest company you’ve never heard of” specialises in large government contracts outsourcing public services. Serco’s activities include running the UK’s National Nuclear Laboratory, as well as London’s bike-sharing scheme. The company operates multiple rail lines in the UK, runs school inspections and manages several public healthcare facilities.

In the UK, Serco has been subject to a string of controversies over the past years, including over-charging the government for a prisoner-tagging contract and falsifying performance data related to a National Health Service contract.

Serco employs 50,000 people around the world, 1500 of which work in the space sector, mostly in Europe, North America and the Middle East. The firm provides services in Earth observation, telecommunications, science, spacecraft management and IT and has a four decades-long tradition of cooperation with ESA.

Serco also has contracts with the German, French and Italian space agencies and Europe’s EUMETSAT meteorological organization.

The Trump Administration has yet to reveal what it plans for NASA, but a hint was recently published on the Motherboard website thanks to documents it obtained from the transition team under a Freedom of Information Act request. The Trump team asked the space agency about surveying the moon for valuable resources. As it turns out, Earth’s nearest neighbor has a lot of them, including platinum group metals, an isotope called helium 3 that could be used to fuel future fusion power plants, and water that could sustain lunar colonists and be refined into rocket fuel. The moon also has oxides of more typical engineering metals such as iron, aluminum, titanium, and silicon.

The idea of trying to monetize space exploration is an inspired one. Typically, a national space program has been considered an expensive hobby that rich and powerful nations engage in for national prestige, with some science on the side. The Apollo program was an example of this approach and, within the parameters set, succeeded brilliantly. Unfortunately, once NASA beat the Soviets to the moon, the American public became bored with lunar missions. The federal government canceled the last three Apollo missions to the moon and shifted to building a space shuttle as a practical alternative.

What then, is the best approach to encourage a lunar mining industry? One approach that should be rejected right away is for NASA to mine the moon in any way except to develop and test technology. The space agency does a lot of great things, but it is rather bad at being a commercial enterprise. The experiment with using the space shuttle as the basis of a national space line proved that. Starting with the second Bush administration and continuing under President Obama, NASA encouraged the development of commercial spacecraft to take astronauts and cargo to and from space. Lunar mining should be developed in the same manner.

NASA can still be of help indirectly. A lunar base, or, as the European Space Agency prefers to call it, a moon village, would be a great initial market for lunar miners. Habitats can be made of local regolith crushed into powder and 3D printed. Water and oxygen could be mined by private businesses and sold to the lunar base. Some of the water would be used for drinking, bathing, and agriculture, and some can be refined into rocket fuel.

Later on, lunar resources could become the basis of space-based industries. Currently, every satellite, every space station module, every ounce of consumable, every spare part that is used in space has to come from Earth and fit inside of a rocket. With access to lunar resources, all of these things can be built in space directly for use. Moreover, companies seeking to manufacture products using microgravity and hard vacuum as part of their industrial process will have raw materials nearer at hand and easier to get at than from Earth.

NASA can certainly start the process of creating a space-based industry using lunar resources. At some point, perhaps in the near future, people will return to the moon for the first time since 1972’s Apollo 17. The crew of the next moon landing will likely be international, since the opportunities for diplomacy and the necessities of cost sharing will require it. But at least one of the first boots on the ground on the lunar soil should belong to an expert in lunar geology, prospecting, and mining. That person can check on robotic precursors that will have been sent beforehand to scout out the best places to mine for resources. The first lunar mining engineer will also set up and run experiments, not only for mining the moon but for refining raw minerals into useful materials. Such materials could be run through a 3D printer to make the first prototype product ever rendered on the moon.

During Apollo men first set foot on the moon coming “in peace for all mankind.” The first moonwalkers also went to demonstrate the superiority of the United States over the Soviet Union and to do some good science. The next moonwalkers will go to create new wealth, new industries, and all the benefits that go with those things. Thus the next lunar age of exploration will proceed on a more sustainable basis than the first.

Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has just published a political study of space exploration entitled Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner. He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the Washington Post, among other venues.

This article will appear in the July 31, 2017 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.

The United States is close to sleepwalking through a major decision regarding its robotic Mars exploration plans — a decision that would depart from decades of commitment to exploring the red planet and potentially undermine 20 years of focused taxpayer investment. And this could occur just as NASA is ready to attempt some of the boldest (and scientifically important) Mars missions yet.

NASA’s Mars Exploration Program is one of the agency’s most successful initiatives in recent history. Created in 2000 in response to the twin failures of the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander missions, this program provided centralized management, a common workforce, and a single organizing principle (beginning with “follow the water”) for an unprecedented campaign of robotic exploration of Mars. The program has overseen seven missions to the red planet — every one a success. The program is now working on an eighth, the Mars 2020 rover, for launch in 2020 (InSight, a stationary lander which launches to Mars in 2018, is managed by NASA’s Discovery Program). Mars 2020 addresses the top recommendation for large-class missions in the current Decadal Survey for planetary science: in addition to in-situ science to seek signs of life, it will prepare a carefully curated selection of drilled samples, store them in advanced sample containers, and deposit them in various “cache depots” on the surface for future retrieval and return. It is the first step of a Mars sample return campaign, one of the most important and enduring goals of the planetary science community, and would provide an opportunity to directly test the life hypothesis at Mars.

A casual observer may be forgiven, then, for looking at the current fleet of five active missions and the development of Mars 2020 and concluding that the program is in good shape. But in a research paper recently released by The Planetary Society, “Mars in Retrograde: A Pathway to Restoring NASA’s Mars Exploration Program,” we found that due to the long lead times for mission development, the immoveable 26-month wait between launch opportunities, and a lack of commitment from NASA and the previous administration, the health of the Mars Exploration Program in the 2020s is deeply uncertain.

Here’s why: NASA has no long-term Mars strategy for its robotic program (its current strategic plan ended in 2016). NASA’s existing Mars spacecraft are, on average, over a decade old and operating long past their intended design lifetimes. Significant budget cuts in 2009 and 2013 disrupted the mission development pipeline, transforming it from a parallel process (multiple missions in various stages of development) to a serialized one (one mission in development at a time). No new missions have been announced since 2012 — the longest drought in new Mars missions in decades — meaning NASA has no official plans to retrieve the samples it is spending billions of dollars to collect and no official intention to refresh its science and telecommunications orbiter network, which is critical for the successful operations of Curiosity, Mars 2020, and any future surface missions.

A new start for a science and telecommunications orbiter is particularly pressing. Twice every Martian day, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Odyssey spacecraft pass over the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers, receiving and then relaying hundreds of megabits of data back to Earth at a very high rate. While the exact rate varies over the year, it is on average thousands of times faster per second than what is possible via the rovers’ direct-to-Earth antennae. These orbiters also provide critical communications coverage during the risky entry, descent, and landing phase of both NASA and European Space Agency spacecraft, and MRO provides peerless high-resolution imaging necessary for selecting safe landing sites for robotic and future human missions.

Both Odyssey and MRO are operating far beyond their intended design lifetimes. Odyssey lost the use of a reaction wheel in 2012, and the loss of its backup would mean the rapid end of its mission. NASA is carefully managing MRO to operate through 2023 to cover the prime mission phase of the Mars 2020 rover, at which point the spacecraft would be 18 years old (it was designed to last five years).

NASA does have emergency backup options with its MAVEN spacecraft and ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter, but both spacecraft are in suboptimal orbits that would greatly complicate operations planning and science return. MAVEN’s orbit could be improved, but at great cost to its science mission. And neither spacecraft can replace the high-resolution imaging capability provided by MRO or be guaranteed to support future sample return efforts.

The director of the Mars Exploration Program, Jim Watzin, declared last year that a new start for a replacement Mars orbiter in fiscal year 2017 was essential. No new start came. The FY 2018 budget request for NASA, while overall very good for planetary science, conspicuously neglected to request a new start, too, going so far as to reduce funding for future Mars missions to a paltry $2.9 million. This amount is down from the $20 million Congress had just allocated for 2017. NASA leadership is understandably hesitant to commit to new projects absent political appointees at the agency. Orbital mechanics, however, do not wait for politics, and this is not a controversial topic.

A new orbiter must launch by 2022 to ensure that data-relay capability is present at Mars by 2023, which would support ongoing operations of Mars 2020 as well as future sample return missions. That’s less than five years away. Absent a new start in FY 2018, a new start request in FY 2019 would leave NASA a mere three years to prep a new orbiter or wait until the 2024 launch window, at which point the spacecraft would arrive at Mars a full two years after the prime mission of Mars 2020. MRO would be 20 years old, should it still be operating. A 2024 launch would also likely push back sample return missions to 2026, if not later.

The highest-priority science goal is to retrieve the samples collected by Mars 2020 later in the decade. There are only a handful of launch opportunities remaining that have a realistic chance to reach Mars in time. Yet the FY 2018 budget request proposes to slash the Mars Technology budget line that should otherwise be advancing critical components such as a low-cost, reliable Mars Ascent Vehicle needed to launch the samples into orbit for rendezvous and return to Earth.

The success of NASA at Mars since 2000 has been so total, so absolute, that it is easy to forget how much of our current knowledge of Mars is due to the investments in this program. More than 2,300 peer-reviewed articles have been published using the data generated by these missions. These data confirmed the extended presence of fresh and salty water on ancient Mars. We now know that the planet was once habitable for life as we know it, and how it lost its atmosphere to become a dry, cold world. NASA missions provide unique data for human exploration by measuring radiation levels in transit and on the surface, capturing detailed information during entry, descent, and landing, and mapping out potential resources for use by human explorers. All of this with a program that has never accounted for more than 5 percent of NASA’s total budget.

Congress can take steps in the FY18 appropriations process to address these problems. It can direct NASA to begin formulation activities for a new Mars orbiter and provide proper Phase A funding. Similar support for the Mars program and its science goals could be expressed in a new authorization bill as well. Quick action by Congress this year would give NASA a fighting chance to make the 2022 launch window and help ensure continuous high-speed communications for Mars 2020 and future missions.

Compellingly, there is ample opportunity to leverage the work done for the now-defunct Asteroid Redirect Mission by utilizing solar electric propulsion (SEP) on a new Mars orbiter. The orbital flexibility provided by this technology would advance the Mars sample return campaign while at the same time providing communications coverage, excellent science, and technical experience using SEP in the Martian system. Congress should also direct additional funding into technology maturation efforts related to sample return, particularly for a Mars Ascent Vehicle, in order to lower the risk and future costs. House appriators in mid-July took an important step by adding $62 million for a Mars orbiter in support of a 2022 launch date. The Senate should embrace this bipartisan action in the House, as well as support critical technology investments for sample return.

An unprecedented fleet of spacecraft from international space agencies is poised to launch to Mars in the 2020s. Europe, China, the United Arab Emirates, India, and Japan are all working on Mars missions slated for the early 2020s. China has also expressed interest in pursuing sample return from Mars in the late 2020s. The United States should not cede its global leadership at Mars during this burst of activity. Instead, we should continue to lead in our scientific exploration while leveraging our international relationships to help enable and support this worldwide fascination with the red planet.

With every passing day, the 2022 launch window for Mars grows closer, as do the launch windows for 2024, 2026, and 2029. The United States, through inaction and distraction, risks sleepwalking through a major decision on its robotic Mars program. Congress, the new presidential administration, and NASA must work to ensure proper scientific return on decades of taxpayer investment.

Decisive action now could mean the difference between a decade of breathtaking scientific discoveries or the sad public spectacle of watching NASA’s Mars fleet slowly die of old age while precious samples atrophy on the surface, waiting for a trip home that may never come.

Casey Dreier is the director of space policy for The Planetary Society, the world’s largest independent pro-space organization. He co-authored the recent paper, “Mars in Retrograde: A Pathway to Restoring NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.”

Dark Energy Survey scientists have unveiled the most accurate measurement ever made of the present large-scale structure of the universe. These measurements of the amount and 'clumpiness' (or distribution) of dark matter in the present-day cosmos were made with a precision that, for the first time, rivals that of inferences from the early universe by the European Space Agency's orbiting Planck observatory. Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Plank

Vega lifts off for its August 1 mission, Flight VV10. Photo: Arianespace.

Arianespace has successfully launched two Earth Observation (EO) satellites for civil and military applications: Optsat 3000 for the Italian Ministry of Defense, and Venus, a joint mission between the Israel Space Agency (ISA) and the French space agency, the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES). The launch took place on Tuesday, August 1 from the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana.

Optsat 3000 is the fourth satellite Arianespace has launched for the Italian Ministry of Defense since 2001. According to the Ministry, the satellite will enable the acquisition and use of high-resolution images from any part of the globe. The Optsat 3000 system will be interoperable with Italy’s second-generation Cosmo-SkyMed radar satellites. This will ensure maximum operational capabilities with the combined optical and radar data offered by these two systems. Telespazio is responsible for the entire system, with OHB Italia in charge of launch services and related engineering support.

Venus is an Earth and vegetation observation and exploratory mission, designed to monitor the effects of climate change. By analyzing and comparing images of the same area at different times, researchers will be able to evaluate soil conditions, understand the development of vegetation, and detect the outbreak of a disease or the contamination of a field.

Vega has now logged 10 launches in total, all successful, since starting operation in 2012 at the Guiana Space Center. In June, Arianespace announced the first two contracts for the Vega C launcher. Scheduled to make its first flight in 2019, Vega C will offer higher performance than the current version in terms of payload weight and usable volume. It will be able to handle a wider range of missions, including nanosatellites and large optical and radar observation satellites, according to Arianespace.

Vega and Vega C now have an order book totaling nine launches, with one-third of them for European governments and two-thirds for commercial customers in export markets.

WASHINGTON — Arianespace’s smallest rocket launched two remote sensing satellites co-produced by Israeli and European teams on an Aug. 1 night mission from the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.

Built by the Italian provider Avio with support from the European Space Agency, Vega now has 10 missions completed since debuting in 2012, launching successfully each time — a feat for the harrowing early days of any launch system where failures are all but expected.

Vega lifted off at 9:58 p.m. Eastern from the Guiana Space Centre’s Vega Launch Complex on a mission lasting slightly over one hour and 37 minutes. The launcher deployed both satellites — the 368-kilogram Optsat-3000 and the 264-kilogram Venμs, or Vegetation and Environment monitoring on a New Micro Satellite — into sun-synchronous orbits.

Avio CEO Giulio Ranzo told SpaceNews Aug. 1 that Vega owes much of its success to simplicity in design.

“Vega was conceived with a simple architecture based on solid propulsion, which is inherently simpler than liquid propulsion as it is made of much fewer parts,” he said, adding that Avio has been building solid rocket motors for more than five decades and has the full manufacturing process vertically integrated. “This factor is certainly responsible for a good part of Vega’s reliability.”

The European Space Agency, spurred by the Italian Space Agency, approved the development of Vega in 2003. Arianespace took commercial responsibility for Vega launches in 2015 after six successful flights.

Three of Vega’s stages, the P80 first stage, Zefiro-23 second stage and Zefiro-9 third stage, all use solid propulsion. Ukrainian rocketry company Yuzhnoye provides the fourth and final stage, the Attitude and Vernier Upper Module, or AVUM, a bipropellant liquid propulsion engine. Ranzo said this upper stage “is also relatively simple” despite being a re-ignitable liquid propulsion system. He said AVUM uses an avionics suite derived from the Ariane 5, Arianespace’s main heavy lift launcher that in June completed its 80th consecutive successful mission.

“The collaboration methodology we have put in place with Arianespace and ESA throughout the last few decades is particularly effective in early detection of potential anomalies,” said Ranzo. “When you put all these aspects together, this is why Vega is so reliable.”

Vega’s design has not changed since the rocket was introduced, Ranzo said, though some components have been optimised. ESA said Aug. 2 that Vega used a lighter payload fairing from Ruag Space Switzerland and ELV, a joint company between Avio and the Italian Space Agency, during its most recent mission.

Optsat-3000 is a high resolution optical satellite that Israel Aerospace Industries, or IAI, built along with the ground segment through an Italian-Israeli inter-governmental agreement. The Leonardo-Thales joint venture Telespazio of Rome was the prime contractor for the mission, and German satellite manufacturer OHB Systems’ Italian division OHB Italia handled launch services and associated engineering support. Optsat-3000 is designed to last more than seven years from its 450-kilometer orbit, and will complement the second-generation Cosmo-SkyMed Italian radar satellites.

The Venμs satellite is designed to capture 760-square kilometer multispectral photos in 12 wavelengths for vegetation monitoring. The satellite also carries a new Hall effect electric propulsion system from Israeli manufacturer Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. Venμs has a chemical propulsion system as backup. The spacecraft has a design life of four and a half years.

Europe’s next generation iteration of Vega, called Vega-C, is scheduled for a first flight in 2019. Airbus in June procured two Vega C launches to orbit four Earth observation satellites two at a time. Vega C is designed to launch 2,300 kilograms to sun-synchronous orbit, up from Vega’s 1,500 kilograms.

WASHINGTON — NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is facing a schedule conflict for its Ariane 5 launch with a European planetary science mission that could, in one scenario, delay the telescope’s launch by several months.

Current plans call for the launch of JWST on an Ariane 5 from the spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana, in October 2018. The European Space Agency is providing the launch of JWST as its contribution for the mission, in exchange for a share of observing time on the telescope.

However, ESA is also planning an October 2018 launch of BepiColombo, its first mission to Mercury, in cooperation with the Japanese space agency JAXA. That mission will also use an Ariane 5 launching from Kourou.

At a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s science committee July 24, Alan Boss, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution and a member of the Astrophysics Advisory Committee, warned that BepiColombo could take precedence over JWST for that October 2018 launch slot.

“BepiColombo has rights to launch before James Webb does,” he said in a summary of a meeting of that advisory committee earlier in the month.

Boss didn’t elaborate on the reasons for that precedence, but BepiColombo, unlike JWST, has a narrow launch window in order to reach Mercury. ESA officials said earlier in July that the mission’s current launch window opens Oct. 5 and runs through Nov. 28. JWST does not have similar launch window restrictions.

While the Ariane 5 is capable of flying at a relatively high cadence — three Ariane 5 rockets launched in May and June of this year — the extensive payload processing requirements of both BepiColombo and JWST appear to rule out launching both missions around the same time.

“It’s unclear if BepiColombo will be out of the way” before JWST arrives at Kourou for launch preparations, Boss said. He believed JWST needed three to six months of “full access” to facilities at Kourou to prepare for launch. “You really want to have BepiColombo long gone before you move in and start taking over.”

If BepiColombo sticks to its current schedule, that could mean delaying JWST by several months. “There’s some concern that that October 2018 launch may actually slip into the spring of 2019,” he said.

That schedule conflict is due in part to delays in the development of BepiColombo. The mission’s launch has slipped several times in the last decade. In 2007, when ESA approved moving the mission into its development phase, it was expected to launch on a Soyuz rocket in 2013.

In 2011, ESA announced the mission would instead launch on a more powerful Ariane 5 in July 2014. The launch slipped in 2012 to August 2015, then later to July 2016, January 2017 and April 2018. Last November, ESA announced that the launch was now scheduled for October 2018 because of a problem with a power processing unit on the spacecraft.

Boss noted BepiColombo’s delays in his presentation, suggesting that the mission could face additional delays. ESA officials, though, said at an event in early July that the spacecraft was on scheduled to ship to French Guiana in early 2018 to being final launch preparations.

“We are looking forward to completing the final tests this year, and shipping to Kourou on schedule,” Ulrich Reininghaus, project manager for BepiColombo at ESA, said in a July 6 statement about the completion of the latest series of tests of the spacecraft. That statement added that the launch schedule for the mission would be confirmed later this year.

JWST has also suffered significant delays in its development, although it has maintained an October 2018 launch date since a re-plan of the mission several years ago. The telescope is currently in an Apollo-era thermal vacuum chamber at NASA’s Johnson Space Center for testing, and will be shipped later this year to a Northrop Grumman facility in Southern California to be integrated to its spacecraft bus and sunshield.

JWST currently has about three and a half months of schedule reserve, an amount that has been gradually decreasing to account for development issues. That current level of schedule reserve is nearly a month below what the project’s plan called for having at this stage in development, but still above recommended levels for projects set by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Additional problems, however, could lead to delays in JWST regardless of any launch site conflicts. “There’s some concern that they might be running out of funded schedule reserve,” Boss said, particularly as the project goes into critical final assembly and testing activities. “There’s some concern, but the JWST folks are confident they will overcome the remaining hurdles and get it done on time.”

Moscow (Sputnik) Aug 01, 2017
Russia's Roscosmos State Space Corporation, US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and European Space Agency (ESA) understand that possible suspension of cooperation may negatively affect each of them, Roscosmos Director General Igor Komarov said Saturday.
"It's very easy to make hasty decisions which would interrupt this cooperation. Both we and our partners understand th Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство

77

Russian official on new US sanctions and NASA: “Nothing lasts forever”

Enlarge/ Expedition 52-53 crewmembers Paolo Nespoli of the European Space Agency (left), Sergey Ryazanskiy of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos, center) and Randy Bresnik of NASA, were all smiles last week before their launch. (credit: NASA)

Last Thursday, the United States overwhelmingly passed a new round of sanctions against Russia, taking the executive actions made by then president Barack Obama in December 2016 and putting them into law. Congress also wrote its legislation such that the White House must get Congressional approval prior to any easing of sanctions against Russia. Despite some concerns about the law, President Donald Trump has said he will sign the bill.

Obama leveled these sanctions, including the dismissal of many Russian diplomats in the United States, following credible reports that the foreign adversary had meddled in the US presidential election. Russian President Vladimir Putin took no action at the time, believing he could work with President Trump to ease the restrictions. But after the Congressional action, Putin acted this weekend to remove hundreds of US diplomats from Russia. The number of US diplomats and Russian nationals employed as staff by the US government must now be 455, the same number Russia has in the United States.

In its most recent round of sanctions, the US government took care to carve out exceptions for key industries, including aerospace. This allows the American rocket company United Launch Alliance to continue to procure RD-180 engines for its Altas V rocket, and for NASA to continue smooth relations with Russia for its partnership with the International Space Station. Three astronauts, from NASA, Italy, and Russia, launched aboard a Russian spacecraft Friday to the station.

Baikonur, Kazakhstan (AFP) July 28, 2017
A three-man space crew from Italy, Russia and the United States on Friday arrived at the International Space Station for a five-month mission Friday.
Footage broadcast by Russia's space agency Roscosmos showed the Soyuz craft carrying NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik, Russian cosmonaut Sergey Ryazansky and Paolo Nespoli of the European Space Agency take off into the dusky sky from Kazhakstan's Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство, Космическое агентство США

Three crew members for the International Space Station launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Friday (July 28). Cosmonaut Sergey Ryazanskiy, Randy Bresnik of NASA and Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli of the European Space Agency lifted off onboard Russia's Soyuz MS-05 spacecraft to spend five months as Expedition 52/53 crew members.

The European Space Agency (ESA) and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are conducting a joint GPS/Galileo space receiver experiment onboard the International Space Station (ISS). This will be the first time that a combined GPS/Galileo receiver will operate in space.

The project aims to demonstrate the robustness of a combined GPS/Galileo waveform...

He is the new guy. Sporting blue overalls – the traditional work garb of European Space Agency (ESA) astronauts – and a broad smile, Matthias Maurer strides confidently through the lobby of the European Astronaut Center (EAC), where so many of his predecessors trained before him. Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство

He is the new guy. Sporting blue overalls – the traditional work garb of European Space Agency (ESA) astronauts – and a broad smile, Matthias Maurer strides confidently through the lobby of the European Astronaut Center (EAC), where so many of his predecessors trained before him. Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство

He is the new guy. Sporting blue overalls – the traditional work garb of European Space Agency (ESA) astronauts – and a broad smile, Matthias Maurer strides confidently through the lobby of the European Astronaut Center (EAC), where so many of his predecessors trained before him. Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство

He is the new guy. Sporting blue overalls – the traditional work garb of European Space Agency (ESA) astronauts – and a broad smile, Matthias Maurer strides confidently through the lobby of the European Astronaut Center (EAC), where so many of his predecessors trained before him. Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство

Ariane 6 launch facilities are under construction in French Guiana along the Vega rocket is getting a n will increase the capabilities of the the space agency and European launch industry. Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Вега, Серия РН Ариан

The Norwegian Space Center has announced successful deployment of critical antennas and probes on the NORsat 1 and NORsat 2 microsatellites built by Canada’s Space Flight Laboratory (SFL), which launched on July 14 from Kazakhstan. Most notable was deployment of a large Yagi antenna from NORsat 2 that will provide first-of-its-kind Very High Frequency (VHF) Data Exchange (VDE) from space, according to the Norwegian Space Center.

Based at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS), SFL built the two microsatellites for maritime traffic monitoring, communications and science applications on behalf of the Norwegian Space Center with support from the Norwegian Coastal Authority, Space Norway, and the European Space Agency (ESA).

In addition, NORsat 1 and NORsat 2 deployed antennas for Automatic Identification System (AIS) receivers to acquire messages from maritime vessels. NORsat 1 also extended four Langmuir probes that are part of a University of Oslo scientific instrument designed to measure space weather impacting communications and navigation equipment.

SFL used its next-generation Earth Monitoring and Observation (NEMO) microsatellite platform to develop the NORsat 1 and 2 microsatellites. Each weighs about 15 kilograms and has main body dimensions of 20 by 30 by 40cm. The microsatellites were integrated at SFL’s Toronto development facility.

With the push of a button, final commands for the European Space Agency's LISA Pathfinder mission were beamed to space on July 18, a final goodbye before the spacecraft was powered down. Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:LISA pathfinder

Pasadena CA (JPL) Jul 25, 2017
With the push of a button, final commands for the European Space Agency's LISA Pathfinder mission were beamed to space on July 18, a final goodbye before the spacecraft was powered down.
LISA Pathfinder had been directed into a parking orbit in April, keeping it out of Earth's way. The final action this week switches it off completely after a successful 16 months of science measurements. Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:LISA pathfinder

A new animated video from the European Space Agency shows how the stars in Earth's galaxy have moved over the last million years — and tracks the movement of six special stars that are speeding through the Milky Way. Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство

WASHINGTON — Germany’s space agency, DLR, signed a delayed but long-expected contract with Bremen-based satellite manufacturer OHB Systems for an experimental telecommunications satellite that will be used in part by the Bundeswehr, Germany’s Federal Armed Forces.

The 310.5 million euro ($362.2 million) contract for the production and launch of the satellite, known as Heinrich Hertz, follows an 11 million euro contract to OHB in 2011, at which point the satellite was scheduled to launch in 2016. DLR and OHB said in June that they now anticipate launching the satellite in 2021.

In a July 20 interview with SpaceNews, Gerd Gruppe, a member of the DLR executive board, attributed the five-year delay in part to the mission concept changing during the early planning phase.

“With the German Ministry of Defense we started a public-public-partnership in order to try a new approach for both sides for realizing satellite projects. We solved a lot of issues which were not expected in the early days of this cooperation,” he said.

Heinrich Hertz will carry 20 or so technology experiments as well as a fully functioning military communications payload. In the agency’s June 28 statement, DLR said the Ka-band payload will replace Ku-band capacity that is currently sourced from commercial operators.

“Another reason for part of the delay is the progress of the general development in industry we had to consider during our call of proposals,” he added.

Heinrich Hertz will use the SmallGEO satellite platform designed under the European Space Agency’s ARTES program. OHB’s first SmallGEO, the Hispasat-36W-1 satellite, launched in January on a Soyuz rocket. That satellite took seven years to build — substantially longer than what most commercial operators are willing to wait for a new spacecraft. OHB has stated its intent to rein in SmallGEO construction times to three years.

An Airbus protest over the Heinrich Hertz contract going to OHB last year further contributed to the delay.

Gruppe said no major changes have occurred with the satellite in the past few years.

DLR is responsible for Heinrich Hertz’s project planning and implementation. Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy is financing the program.

Among the experiments on Heinrich Hertz will be several different propulsion systems.

“Heinrich Hertz is planned to use chemical and electric propulsion,” Gruppe said. “We want to test and operate the new electric [High Efficiency Multistage Plasma] thrusters for station keeping, which were developed for DLR. As backup we implement the electric [Hall-Effect Thrusters] thrusters for risk mitigation. The chemical propulsion will be used for orbit transfer and for station keeping, too.”

Gruppe said the satellite will test new antennas, flexible amplifiers, multiplexers, filters and onboard processing units. The satellite will also test new user equipment, including mobile antennas and modems, he said.

Heinrich Hertz’s communications payload showcases technology that can make satellites more adaptable to changing needs on the ground.

“Using a variety of flexible technologies, such as small on-board computers, it will be possible to continually reprogram the satellite from the ground station throughout its 15-year mission,” Heiko Ultes, DLR’s project manager for Heinrich Hertz, said in a June 28 statement. “This means that existing signal resources could be adapted efficiently to meet ever-changing demands. This effectively means that ‘Heinrich Hertz’ is ‘capable of learning’ throughout its life.”

Gruppe said the contract for the next phase of the Heinrich Hertz program should be signed later this year. That contract includes the procurement of a launcher by OHB, as well as the construction of one main control center and one backup control center. The mission will also require 7-meter- and 13-meter-class ground station antennas.

Heinrich Hertz is named after the German physicist who first relayed electromagnetic waves in free space from a transmitter to a receiver in 1886. Gruppe said the satellite will not be used for any commercial services.

Enlarge/ Crater water ice on Mars at Vastitas Borealis, seen by the European Space Agency's Mars Express. (credit: ESA)

This week we all had a good laugh at the expense of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), who asked NASA scientists during a committee hearing whether it was possible that a civilization existed on Mars thousands of years ago. "Would you rule that out?" he asked. "See, there's some people... Well, anyway."

Rohrabacher is an interesting figure in Washington, whose once-idiosyncratic views seem largely in vogue with those of the new administration. Politicocalled Rohrabacher "Putin's favorite Congressman" in a mini-profile last year. Like Trump, the Congressman has also has called climate change a hoax. In a 2014 letter to President Obama, Rohrabacher wrote, "Mr. President, we both know I have referred to the theory of man-made global warming as a 'hoax,' and, yes, I once used to the phrase 'dinosaur flatulence' as a soft jab at what I considered to be climate alarmism."

So after Rohrabacher's question—which seemed driven by some arcane conspiracy theory given his use of "some people"—it was curious that one of his few defenders was a well known climate scientist, Gavin Schmidt. "To be fair, NASA astrobiology is very interested in this (and similar) questions. Not sure why it's out-of-bounds to ask," the NASA climate modeler wrote on Twitter.

When people aren’t scanning Google Street View for directions to their next mundane destination, they might be using it to tour the bustling markets of Bangkok, float over colorful corals in the Bahamas, or count Adélie penguins in Antarctica. For a few minutes, they can immerse themselves in strange and beautiful parts of the planet they’ll likely never see for themselves. Now, they can also leave the planet altogether.

The newest images on Google Street View come from inside the International Space Station, the research laboratory orbiting 250 miles above Earth at more than 17,500 miles per hour. They were taken earlier this year by European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet, of France, as he floated through the station from module to module, using a DSLR camera that was already on board. Sometimes he shot freehand—after all, what use is a tripod in microgravity? When he needed to stabilize the camera, Pesquet rested it against bungee cords that were drawn tightly between two walls of a module. He sent the photos down to Earth, where the Google Street View team stitched them together to create panoramic views of the station and added annotations that explain to users what they’re seeing. You can check them out here.

The images reveal a tangled world of technical equipment and everyday objects pressed against walls with cables and tape. They show the areas astronauts and cosmonauts use to conduct research, eat, exercise, and yes, even go to the bathroom. NASA usually describes the size of the living and working quarters of the ISS as akin to a five-bedroom house, but that description doesn’t adequately capture the station’s layout—15 connected modules, all sticking out in different directions. Pesquet said in a video about the project that the station feels much roomier than it looks in part because there’s no floor. Astronauts can float right up to every wall and use it as a surface. Still, it’s pretty cozy in there. Any future missions beyond Earth’s orbit will require people who don’t mind that.

The Google Street View team spent two days wandering through NASA’s replica of the ISS in Houston to create instructions for Pesquet. On Earth, Street View cameras are anchored to cars, trolleys, snowmobiles or backpacks, a level of stability they couldn’t replicate in space. “All of our Street View procedures are predicated on the existence of gravity,” one team member jokes in the video.

The ISS is unlike any of the natural scenes users might explore using Google Street View. You can’t pine for the same things. When you’re dragging your mouse around the white-sand beaches of Indonesia, you might daydream about the sound of the lapping waves or the caw of birds overhead. But on the space station, there’s no weather to long for because there’s no weather, period. For months, astronauts don’t feel a breeze, the warmth of the sun, or the sounds of living things other than their roommates.

The last command to LISA Pathfinder was sent at around 8:00 pm Central European Time on 18 July 2017, after 16 months of scientific operation, marking the end of a sophisticated technology demonstration in space. The Space Administration at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) and the Max Planck Society funded the German contribution to this European Space Agency (ESA) mission. Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство, Plank, LISA pathfinder

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LISA Pathfinder paves the way for the gravitational-wave observatory LISA

The last command to LISA Pathfinder was sent at around 8:00 pm Central European Time on 18 July 2017, after 16 months of scientific operation, marking the end of a sophisticated technology demonstration in space. The Space Administration at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) and the Max Planck Society funded the German contribution to this European Space Agency (ESA) mission. Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство, Plank, LISA pathfinder

99

LISA Pathfinder paves the way for the gravitational-wave observatory LISA

The last command to LISA Pathfinder was sent at around 8:00 pm Central European Time on 18 July 2017, after 16 months of scientific operation, marking the end of a sophisticated technology demonstration in space. The Space Administration at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) and the Max Planck Society funded the German contribution to this European Space Agency (ESA) mission. Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство, Plank, LISA pathfinder

100

LISA Pathfinder paves the way for the gravitational-wave observatory LISA

The last command to LISA Pathfinder was sent at around 8:00 pm Central European Time on 18 July 2017, after 16 months of scientific operation, marking the end of a sophisticated technology demonstration in space. The Space Administration at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) and the Max Planck Society funded the German contribution to this European Space Agency (ESA) mission. Перейти к новостиКлючевые слова:Европейское космическое агентство, Plank, LISA pathfinder